Four Roses

The Four Roses, manufactured by A.B.T. Manufacturing Company in 1936, holds an interesting place in early electromechanical (EM) pinball history thanks to its origin story. Four Roses has a hand-painted playfield and is actually a repainted version of another, unidentified A.B.T. game. It was one of several winning entries in a contest the manufacturer held to increase operator profits, inviting artists to create eye-catching playfield art; each design was then tested side-by-side on location against its original counterpart to see which brought in more money.

The gameplay features and mechanics of the Four Roses are not well-documented, but as a flipperless EM machine of the mid-1930s, it likely relied on a manually launched ball and simple scoring mechanisms determined by where the ball landed among the playfield's pins and pockets.

Despite the scarcity of information available, the Four Roses remains an intriguing piece of pinball history both for its early production date and for its role in A.B.T.'s playfield-art profit experiments, offering a window into how manufacturers of the era thought about the business of pinball.