Home Run

Home Run, produced by D. Robbins and Company of Brooklyn, New York in August 1936, is a single-player, baseball-themed electro-mechanical pin game from the pre-flipper era. Robbins was a smaller East Coast presence in a business dominated by Chicago manufacturers, and this game came near the end of the company's 1932-1936 manufacturing run.

Home Run offered ten balls for five cents, with the cabinet advertised at 41 inches long and 21 inches wide, and the playfield carried no bumpers. The game sold to operators for $39.50, and the manufacturer would furnish it with a 1-cent coin chute instead of the standard 5-cent chute at no additional cost, a flexible touch for Depression-era operators. As with all games of this vintage, play centered on the plunger and careful nudging rather than any player-controlled flippers, which would not be invented until 1947.

One point of historical care: this 1936 Robbins pin game should not be confused with the 1940 pistol gum vendor also called 'Home Run', made by Victor Vending Corporation of Chicago and distributed in New York by Robbins. Though little is documented about the game's artwork or designer, Home Run remains an interesting artifact of pinball's mid-1930s boom years.