Bump-A-Lite

Bump-A-Lite, manufactured by Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing Company and dated February 16, 1937, is an electro-mechanical payout machine from pinball's pre-flipper era. Carrying model number 31, this single-player game belongs to the class of 1930s machines that rewarded successful play with coin payouts, a common format before such games came under legal scrutiny in many American cities.

Little documentation survives about Bump-A-Lite's playfield layout, artwork, or theme. As a product of the late 1930s, it would have been a flipperless game in which the player launched balls onto the playfield and gravity and chance largely determined the outcome, with electro-mechanical circuitry handling scoring and payouts.

While it is not a landmark title, Bump-A-Lite is a representative artifact of Chicago Coin's prolific 1930s output and of the payout-machine segment of the early coin-op industry, making it a period piece of interest to historians of the pre-war game business.