Hot Tip

Hot Tip, manufactured by J. H. Keeney and Company of Chicago in May 1947, is an artifact from the post-war coin-op era. It is a one-ball horserace game - a gambling-oriented format popular in the 1940s in which the player shot a single ball per play, hoping to land it in a winning lane tied to the game's horse racing theme.

As an electro-mechanical machine, Hot Tip relied on relays and electromagnets to control its operation. Notably, it predates the flipper, which would not appear in the industry until later in 1947; like other one-ball horserace games, play was determined by the shot from the plunger and the luck of the ball's path rather than player-controlled flippers.

Little documentation of Hot Tip's specific features or artwork survives in available records, and the game has gone largely unremarked upon by historians. Even so, it offers a glimpse into a distinctive branch of coin-op history - the horserace one-ball games that flourished briefly after the war before changing laws and the rise of flipper pinball pushed the format aside.