Silver Skates

Silver Skates, manufactured by Bally in March 1941, is a single-player, Flipperless electro-mechanical pinball machine with a hockey theme. By 1941 Bally had already been producing EM games for several years (including 1934's 'Signal'), so Silver Skates reflects an established design tradition rather than a pioneering first for electro-mechanical pinball.

Gameplay offers five balls for 5 cents, with fourteen passive bumpers spread across the playfield providing the primary scoring obstacles -- a relatively dense bumper layout for a game of this era. As a Flipperless machine, play relies entirely on the initial plunger shot and the layout of the bumpers and rollovers rather than any flipper control, consistent with pinball design conventions of the early 1940s, several years before the flipper's invention.

No designer is credited in IPDB's records for this machine. Its hockey theme and dense bumper field make it a solid, representative example of pre-war Bally pinball, produced not long before the United States' entry into World War II would disrupt the amusement manufacturing industry.