Glider

The Glider, manufactured by Genco Manufacturing Company of Chicago in 1949, is not actually a pinball machine, despite appearing in some Genco documentation mixed in with pinball data. It is a puck bowler: a shuffleboard-style game roughly 8 feet long by 2 feet wide that uses targets instead of bowling pins. Contemporary descriptions in Billboard said it "combines pin game and shuffle board attraction" and "scores much the way 5-ball play points are recorded."

The game offered 15 shots for 5 cents using a single puck, and was novelty play only, with no replays. Production ran from August 12 to November 19, 1949, with a confirmed 1,185 units built. Its release came during the shuffleboard and shuffle-alley boom of the late 1940s, when coin machine manufacturers rushed to capitalize on the craze; a Billboard article from September 1949 notes Bally introducing a sample 'Glider' shuffleboard game to operators in New York in the same period.

While the Glider sits outside pinball proper, it is an interesting artifact of how pinball manufacturers like Genco diversified into adjacent amusement games, and of how scoring conventions from 5-ball pinball carried over into these hybrid novelty machines.