Big Five

Big Five, manufactured by J. H. Keeney and Company Incorporated of Chicago, Illinois, is an electro-mechanical machine from January 1936, dating to the early days of the coin-op industry. Notably, it was a payout machine, a class of game that dispensed winnings to players, which places it in the gambling-adjacent branch of pinball's family tree rather than among pure amusement games.

As a single-player game built more than a decade before the invention of the flipper, Big Five would have been played by launching balls and letting gravity and chance determine the outcome, in the style typical of mid-1930s machines. Detailed information about its playfield layout, art, and design has not survived in the historical record, leaving much about the game to speculation.

Its manufacturer, J. H. Keeney and Company, operated from 1934 to 1964, and Big Five offers a small window into that company's early output. A Junior version of the game was also released in February 1936. Though little is known about this particular title, its existence is a reminder of the pioneering work done by early manufacturers who laid the groundwork for the industry's later growth.