Was pinball really illegal?
Just after World War II broke out, American cities also went to war…against the popular arcade attraction. (Blame the youths.)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Politicians and the media denounce something popular in youth culture as morally bankrupt, downright dangerous, and a waste of time and money.
It happened to comic books, rock ’n roll music, and Dungeons & Dragons. In 1993, even video games came under attack in a series of highly publicized Congressional hearings condemning violence in games such as Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.
But 50 years earlier it was video games’ analog arcade ancestor, the pinball machine, that was the menace to society threatening America’s youth. By the 1930s, pinball machines were ubiquitous in bars and amusement centers across the country. Machines at the time didn’t yet have flippers and were largely games of chance, and players gambled for small prizes or an extra free game.
As pinball machines grew in popularity, they became an increasingly large target for political hand-wringing over their supposed detrimental effects on children. Pinball machines robbed the “pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money,” then-New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia wrote in a Supreme Court affidavit.
La Guardia launched an outright war on pinball machines, which he believed to be a mob racket intent on stealing the hard-earned money of helpless citizens who were hopelessly addicted to gambling. (To be fair, there is evidence that criminal organizations controlled a large portion of the pinball industry in New York City, but hey, the mafia had its fingers in a lot of pies at the time.)
The bombing of Pearl Harbor gave La Guardia the opportunity to finally take down pinball, arguing that the materials used to manufacture the machines would be better used in the war effort. “We feel that it is infinitely preferable that the metal in these evil contraptions be manufactured into arms and bullets which can be used to destroy our foreign enemies,” he said.
On January 21, 1942, La Guardia officially banned pinball in New York City and ordered the police department to conduct Prohibition-style raids, confiscating thousands of machines and arresting their owners. They then staged press conferences where they were photographed gleefully smashing the machines with sledgehammers. Other cities such as Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles quickly followed with similar bans.
Pinball’s unsavory reputation lasted for decades, even after the invention of the flipper in 1947, which transformed the machines into skill-based games. Yet pinball persevered, although publicly relegated to underground speakeasies and the dark corners of seedy bars and porn shops. Life, uh, finds a way.
It wasn’t until 1976 that New York City’s ban on pinball finally ended, thanks to a young writer and pinball wizard named Roger Sharpe. Sharpe was called before the New York City Council as a star witness to prove that pinball was no longer a game of chance but a skill-based form of entertainment. In a deft display of control, Sharpe accurately called precisely where he would send the ball, and after a perfect pull of the plunger, the council overturned the ban. (A movie about the whole ordeal just landed on Hulu).
As the Mortal Kombat announcer would say, “Fatality!”
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