Laura

"Laura" is a 1945 game from the Williams Manufacturing Company, released in November of the company's second year in business. It is a flipperless electro-mechanical conversion game: rather than an all-new machine, it was sold as a conversion applied to older games. Period advertising lists more than a dozen eligible donors, mostly Bally titles from 1940-41 such as 'Attention', 'Broadcast', 'Flicker', 'Silver Skates', and 'Pan-American'. Wartime material restrictions had made conversions like this a mainstay of the industry, letting operators refresh old cabinets with new art and play.

The gameplay is simple prewar-style fare: 12 passive bumpers and a single kick-out hole, with no flippers, which would not be invented until 1947. Players relied on the plunger and careful nudging to steer the ball toward scoring bumpers. 'Laura' shares its playfield and backglass layout with another Williams conversion of the same year, 'Flat-Top', and magazine ads show the two shared the same cabinet front design, perhaps in different colors.

The game's title and its Girls/Women theme arrived just a year after Otto Preminger's celebrated Hollywood film 'Laura' premiered in October 1944, a timing that seems unlikely to be coincidence. As an early Williams product and a wartime-era conversion, it is a rare and historically interesting piece for collectors of 1940s pinball.