Silver Gate

The Silver Gate, manufactured by A.B.T. Manufacturing Company of Chicago in July 1933, is a single-player Pure Mechanical pinball machine from one of the more prolific manufacturers of the era. As a Pure Mechanical game from 1933, it predates the invention of the flipper by well over a decade, so play would have relied on the plunger and the mechanical layout of the playfield rather than any flipper control.

Documentation for Silver Gate is sparse: IPDB records confirm only its manufacturer, year, and machine type, without detail on its specific playfield features, artwork, or theme -- not unusual for many surviving games from pinball's earliest commercial period, when elaborate backglass art and named themes were far less standardized than they would later become.

Even with limited documentation, Silver Gate stands as a representative example of A.B.T.'s early-1930s output and of the broader Pure Mechanical era of pinball, offering collectors and historians a tangible link to the game's formative years.