Gottlieb

» see gottlieb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

David Gottlieb set up D. Gottlieb & Co. in Chicago in 1927, with his brother Sol, making coin-operated amusement machines at a time when that meant something closer to a carnival device than a game. The company's first real hit was Baffle Ball in 1931, a countertop cabinet with no electricity in it at all, where you fired a ball up a lane and watched it fall through pins into scoring holes. It sold something like fifty thousand units into the worst years of the Depression, because a machine that took a penny and gave nothing back was a good business to be in when nobody had money.

Chicago became the pinball city on the back of that. Gottlieb and Bally operated within driving distance of each other, and Williams joined them in 1943. Those firms traded staff for decades and between them set what a pinball table was for most of the century.

The company outlasted two corporate owners and one rename, and it was still shipping tables twenty four years after the video arcade arrived to replace it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the flipper ~

Until 1947 you could not really play pinball. You launched the ball and then you influenced it, by nudging the cabinet and by hoping, and cities banned the machines as gambling devices on exactly that reasoning, because a game of pure chance that takes your coin is a slot machine wearing a playfield.

Humpty Dumpty changed that. Harry Mabs designed it for Gottlieb and put six solenoid-driven bats along the sides of the table, two-inch things the player operated with buttons. Suddenly the ball could be answered. It took decades for the legal position to catch up across the country, and the famous test came in New York in 1976 when a writer called Roger Sharpe called his shot in front of the city council to prove skill was involved. Gottlieb had built the argument he was making twenty nine years earlier.

~ the arcade detour ~

Columbia Pictures bought Gottlieb in 1976 for $47 million, and when Coca-Cola bought Columbia the pinball company became a soft-drink subsidiary and got renamed Mylstar Electronics in 1983. Under that structure it made video games as well, and one of them stuck. Q*bert came out in 1982, an isometric cube-hopping game with an orange creature who swore in a speech balloon full of punctuation while a Votrax chip produced genuine nonsense, and it went everywhere. There were Q*bert lunchboxes and a Saturday morning cartoon.

Pinball cabinets never really arrived in Turkey in any volume. The coin-op machines I grew up around were video cabinets and later the internet cafe, so what I know about Gottlieb is Q*bert as a picture on other things rather than as a company that made furniture for American bars. A pinball table weighs about 250 pounds and has to be shipped, installed and serviced by somebody local, and that logistics chain is why the format stayed a North American and European object for most of its life.

~ the ownership shuffle ~

Coca-Cola wanted out of the amusement business by 1984. In October of that year a management group under Gilbert G. Pollock bought the pinball assets and formed Premier Technology, which then traded under the Gottlieb name because that was the name with sixty years of value in it. The video side was gone. What remained was a table manufacturer in Bensenville, Illinois, with a plant that grew past eighty thousand square feet and around three hundred people in it, plus a second operation in West Fargo, North Dakota that ran up to a hundred more.

The early nineties were briefly good. The Addams Family in 1992, built by Bally at a competitor, became the best-selling pinball machine ever made and dragged the whole category up with it. Every manufacturer in Chicago expanded capacity on the strength of that one machine.

~ the last table ~

What took pinball out was not the video arcade, which it had survived once already. It was the home console. A Super Nintendo or a PlayStation in the living room removed the reason to take quarters somewhere else, and operators stopped reordering because the locations stopped earning. Every manufacturer in Chicago felt it inside about three years.

Gottlieb's last production machine was Barb Wire in April 1996, a licensed table built around a Pamela Anderson film that flopped in cinemas. Premier Technology ceased business that summer, sixty nine years after Baffle Ball. Williams held on until 1999 and then quit too, leaving Stern as the only American manufacturer still standing. The Gottlieb trademarks and machine rights sit today with Gottlieb Development LLC in Pelham Manor, New York, which services the tables rather than building them.

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