Lite-O-Card

The Lite-O-Card, manufactured by D. Gottlieb & Company in November 1939, is a flipperless electro-mechanical pin game designed by Harry Mabs with artwork by Roy Parker, two names that would loom large in Gottlieb's later history. Mabs would go on to invent the flipper for Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty in 1947, and Parker became the company's defining artist of the postwar era.

The playfield carries thirteen spring bumpers. Hitting the numbered bumpers lights the corresponding numbers on four card displays on the backglass, giving the game its card-lighting objective. A distinctive touch is the player-controlled selector knob on the front of the cabinet, an unusual bit of player interaction for a 1939 pin game.

Gottlieb had released a similar pin game six months earlier, the 1939 Lot-O-Fun, which lacked the selector knob. As a pre-flipper Gottlieb game uniting Mabs and Parker, the Lite-O-Card is an interesting artifact from the era just before wartime production halts and the flipper revolution reshaped the industry.