Hit

The 1938 "Hit" from Genco Manufacturing Company is an early piece of pinball history from one of Chicago's longest-running coin machine firms. Founded in 1931, Genco was a fixture of the pre-war pinball industry, and Hit, released in May 1938, is a single-player electro-mechanical game from the era just before flippers transformed the hobby.

Hit's defining feature is its array of seventeen passive bumpers, an impressive count for its time. As a flipperless game, play consisted of launching balls onto the playfield and letting them cascade through the bumper field, with scoring determined by which bumpers the ball struck on its way down. This simplicity belies the machinery underneath, as electro-mechanical games of the period used electrical contacts and scoring circuits that represented a real step up from the purely mechanical games of just a few years earlier.

Little else is documented about Hit beyond its manufacturer, release date, and bumper count, and no theme is recorded for the game. That obscurity is itself typical of the hundreds of workmanlike pin games Chicago factories turned out in the late 1930s, and it leaves Hit as a modest but genuine artifact of pinball's rapid pre-war evolution.