Smokehouse

The Smokehouse pinball machine, manufactured by Brunswick Manufacturing Company in September 1932, is a Pure Mechanical (PM) payout machine from the very early days of coin-operated pinball. As a pure mechanical game, it relied entirely on physical mechanisms with no electrical components at all, a hallmark of the earliest pinball designs before electromechanical relays became standard.

Gameplay on the Smokehouse would have involved plunging balls onto a fixed layout of targets, lanes, and obstacles, since this predates the 1947 invention of the flipper by 15 years — there was no way for a player to actively control the ball once it was in play, only to influence its path through skillful plunging or, on some machines of the era, careful nudging of the cabinet.

No specific theme or artwork details survive for the Smokehouse, which was common for payout machines of this period, whose cabinets prioritized function over elaborate decoration. As an early-1930s pure mechanical payout game, it represents a formative stage in pinball's development, well before the amusement-focused, flipper-driven machines that would follow later in the decade and beyond.