Owl

The Mills Novelty Company's Owl, released in January 1941, is a flipperless electro-mechanical pinball machine designed for territories that prohibited one-ball games like Mills' own "1 2 3." It nominally offers five balls for five cents, but its scoring gimmick only rewards the very first ball of the game.

Owl's defining feature is its trio of backbox reels, which advance whenever their corresponding passive bumpers (12 in total) are hit — but only during the first ball in play. The backglass displays how many points different reel combinations are worth, and free plays are awarded for high scores and projected onto the glass beneath the owl artwork. Because the remaining four balls don't affect the reels and only add to the score, players who whiffed on ball one often abandoned the rest of the game and started over; operators could even convert the machine to strict one-ball play by removing the other four balls.

While little is documented about Owl's designer, its whimsical owl-themed backglass art gives it a distinct identity among Mills' payout-era machines. As a game built specifically to work around regional restrictions on one-ball pinball, Owl offers an interesting window into how manufacturers adapted their products to local gambling laws in the early 1940s.