The All-American Automatic Base Ball game was first shown to the public in 1929. The machine gave the player a lever to control the bat, which may have been the predecessor of pinball's flipper. It kept track of balls, strikes, outs, and runners. It counted called strikes and foul strikes. It had the pitcher pitch both balls and strikes, and it positioned an umpire behind him to signal the call with his arms.
The names of some period players were used. Before the advent of the All-Star Game, these teams were made up of players from a mixture of the two leagues.
The mechanical baseball game was shown in a 1929 issue of Popular Mechanics and written about in a 1930 issue of the coin-op magazine Automatic Age. A new version for 1931 was advertised in Automatic Age.
George Miner filed his patent for the apparatus near the beginning of 1932, and it was granted near the end of 1936. Unfortunately, Miner had died in a plane crash a year before.
The game lived on and became Rock-ola's 1937 World Series. By then a few other bat games had been made, but this one is the father of all arcade baseball.
Flippers were introduced for pinball in 1947, an innovation that changed the coin-op game business for the better. In what might not be a coincidence, Williams made its first of many baseball machines that year, a line that ended with that Slug-Fest machine I enjoyed at an Outer Banks boardwalk in the '90s.
LINKS TO VIDEOS
A restored version of the 1929 game being shown off
A quick look at the 1937 arcade machine
Fifteen-minute video, the first six minutes being the 1937 game in action (the same channel also has part 2 of the technical descriptions and a 40-minute video on how it differs from an earlier model)
EDIT 10/21/19: Added two words that were missing. Also, removed one parenthetical aside.
No comments:
Post a Comment