Gold Star

The Gold Star, designed by Harry Mabs with artwork by Roy Parker, was manufactured by D. Gottlieb & Company in October 1940. It is a flipperless electro-mechanical game from the era before the flipper transformed pinball - fittingly, its own designer, Harry Mabs, would go on to introduce the flipper to the industry with Gottlieb's 'Humpty Dumpty' in 1947.

As a pre-flipper game, Gold Star offered the style of play typical of its day: the player launched balls onto the playfield and watched gravity and the layout determine the result, with skill expressed chiefly through the plunger shot. It is a single-player game, produced in the final stretch of pinball's first golden age before wartime restrictions curtailed the industry.

With a Mabs design and Roy Parker artwork, Gold Star pairs two names that would loom large in Gottlieb's postwar success, making this modest 1940 game an interesting early chapter in both careers.