Sources
Contributors to this record: Flipcommons AI Descriptions (GameFormat), Flipcommons Catalog.
- description
- Flipcommons AI Descriptions (GameFormat)The bingo machine is pinball's gambling cousin: the player shoots five balls onto a field of holes, trying to light numbers into a line on a 5×5 card printed across the backglass.[1] It arrived in 1951 with [[manufacturer:bally]]'s *[[title:bright-lights]]*, the first "in-line" machine, whose playfield layout became the pattern every later bingo followed.[2] The play is elemental — a coin buys a card, five balls go up the shooter, and three or more numbers in a line wins.[3] In its classic form the machine carries no [[gameplay-feature:flippers]] at all: once a ball is loose, only careful nudging of the cabinet can influence it.[4] Bingos exist because of a law. The federal Johnson Act of 1950 banned interstate shipment of gambling devices — the slot machines and single-shot "one-ball" games [[manufacturer:bally]] had dominated — and the in-line bingo was the trade's workaround, a new kind of pin game to take their place.[5] For all its amusement styling the result was frankly a gambling machine: a player fed extra coins before the shot to lengthen the payout odds, and a winning card was settled by the location in free games or cash.[6] The format's on-and-off relationship with the flipper grows from that same legal tangle. Because courts in many places treated flipper games as machines of skill, exempt from the gambling bans, a common workaround was to fit flippers to a bingo to lend it a veneer of skill — something [[manufacturer:bally]] itself never did, but that operators and later makers took up.[7] Squeezed out of its home market, the genre also emigrated: long after the American firms had abandoned it, makers in [[location:italy]], [[location:spain]] and [[location:belgium]] kept the electronic bingo in production for export,[8] among them the Belgian houses [[manufacturer:sirmo-games-sa]] and [[manufacturer:splin-sa]], whose flippered cabinets carried the once-American genre into the solid-state era.
- display_order
- 8Flipcommons Catalog
- name
- Bingo PinballFlipcommons Catalog
- status
- activeFlipcommons Catalog
- slug
- bingo-pinballFlipcommons Catalog
Citations
- Pacific Pinball Museum — https://www.pacificpinball.org/pinball-gambling
bingo games had no flippers and their playfields were arranged with holes that corresponded to a bingo card on the backglass
- Bingo Pinballs — http://bingo.cdyn.com/machines/bally/bright_lights/
Bally's first in-line bingo machine [...] Bally's playfield layout became the standard for bingo's
- Bingo Pinballs — http://bingo.cdyn.com/machines/bally/bright_lights/
Deposit one coin/credit per card, and shoot the five balls. If you get three or more in a line, you win
- Kineticist — https://www.kineticist.com/news/a-beginners-guide-to-bingo-pinball
There were no flippers on any bingo pinball produced
- Bingo Pinballs — https://bingo.cdyn.com/history/gamblingpins/johnson.html
banned inter-state shipment of [...] the first "in-line" or "bingo" type pingames came into being
- Pacific Pinball Museum — https://www.pacificpinball.org/pinball-gambling
award them either free plays or cash [...] a player could add more coins at the start of play to increase the payout odds on certain combinations
- Bingo Pinballs — https://bingo.cdyn.com/oddities/flippers/
flipper pins were skill machines, so the winning of free games on those was ok [...] stick flippers on a bingo
- Bingo Pinballs — http://danny.cdyn.com/Section15.htm
electronic Bingos from Europe [...] solid-state machines from Italy, Spain, and Belgium