 |
  |
 |
  
 
| ||||||||||
|
Chicago Company is America's Last Arcade Hope (Part I)
by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
Williams Electronics, located on North California Avenue in Chicago's east side, may not look like much from the outside, but it is one of the most successful entertainment companies in America. Not only did this company play a pioneering role in the evolution of pinball, it is the last surviving dinosaur of America's video arcade super powers.
Williams Games was founded in 1942 by Harry Williams. When Williams first entered the business, in the early thirties, pinball tables did not have flippers, bumpers, tilt mechanisms, or electronic scoring holes. They were simply slanted planes with pins for guiding balls and holes for scoring points.
Williams, a graduate of the Stanford school of engineering, revolutionized pinball with several inventions. His most famous invention, which he unveiled in 1932, was a device that limited the amount of "body English" players could use during a game. Williams placed a metal ball on a pedestal in the base of his pinball machine. If players nudged the machine enough to knock the ball off the pedestal, the game shut down. He originally called his device the "Stool Pigeon," but when a customer complained that the machine had "tilted," Williams decided to call it the "tilt" mechanism.
In 1933, Williams built Contact---the first electric pinball machine. Contact featured an electrically-powered scoring-pocket (called the "contact hole") which knocked the ball back into the playfield to continue scoring points.
"Previous to Contact, the skill for the player was to send the ball up on the playifield, have it roll around, and hope that his aim was such that the ball would somehow magically weave its way around through the pins that were nailed into the playfield," says Roger Sharpe Williams executive, author of Pinball!, a book about the history of pinball.
Despite the innovations made by Williams Games, another Chicago-based pinball company called D. Gottlieb and Company was generally considered the first name in arcade games. Things changed in the early 1980s, however, when a new kind of game overtook the arcades.
Two of the greatest legends of pinball still work at Williams. The first is Steve Kordek, the man who placed the flippers on the bottom of pinball machines. Kordek was not the person who came up with the idea of the flippers, that was Harry Mabs; but Mabs placed six flippers along the sides of his pinball table. Kordek, who was designing pinball machines for a very small company at the time, could not afford six flippers, so he placed two along the sink hole of his machine.
The other pinball legend is Roger Sharpe--the man who got pinball legalized in New York.
In the forties, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, New York City's first highly efficient mayor of Itallian decent, illegalized pinball as a form of gambling. (He was, by the way, correct. Pinball tables were used for gambling at that time.) This ban held until the 1980s, when an amazingly talented pinball wizard named Roger Sharpe demonstrated that pinball was a game of skill to the New York City Counsel by calling his shots before launching them.
TO BE CONTINUED.... Coming up in Part II of this article: Williams heats up the video games market. Check back here!
