Shangri-La

Shangri-La, manufactured by D. Gottlieb & Company in 1943, is a single-player, flipperless electro-mechanical game with an unusually specific piece of history behind its name and theme. It commemorates the Doolittle Raid of April 18, 1942 — the United States' first air strike on Japan following Pearl Harbor. When reporters pressed President Franklin Roosevelt to reveal where the bombers had launched from, he deflected by saying they came from 'our new secret base at Shangri-La,' borrowing the name of the mythical Himalayan paradise from James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon (adapted into a popular 1937 film).

As a wartime release, Shangri-La fits into a broader pattern of pinball manufacturers embracing patriotic and military themes during World War II. As a flipperless EM machine, gameplay centered on plunger-launched balls, targets, and rollovers rather than player-controlled flippers, which had only just been introduced to the industry a few years earlier and were not yet standard.

No designer is documented for Shangri-La, but its title alone ties it directly to one of the most memorable wartime quips of the era, making it a distinctive artifact of how current events shaped pinball theming in the early 1940s.