Bubbles

Bubbles, produced by Genco Manufacturing Company, is an extraordinarily rare pinball machine: according to Genco's own records, only seven sample units were built, all on a single day, April 17, 1947. The reason it never advanced to full production remains unknown, making it one of the scarcest documented pinball machines of the postwar era.

Bubbles is a single-player, flipperless electro-mechanical game whose playfield layout is nearly identical to Genco's other 1947 release, 'Honey.' It features eight passive bumpers and four kick-out holes, giving players a fast-paced, if straightforward, scoring layout typical of late-1940s EM design, just before flippers became a standard feature across the industry.

The game's theme, built around dancing women in a burlesque-adjacent 'ecdysiast entertainment' style, was a common subject for pinball art of the period. Only two photographed examples of Bubbles are known: one with retro-fitted flippers and one still in its original flipperless configuration, complete with rubber-banded posts later removed to make room for the flipper conversion. Its cabinet artwork matches that of Genco's 'Triple Action,' the company's first game to ship with factory-installed flippers in January 1948, underscoring just how close Bubbles came to sitting at that pivotal transition in pinball history.