Pamco Chase
About This Machine
The Pamco Chase is a 1936 pinball machine produced by Pacific Amusement Manufacturing Company (PAMCO) of Chicago, a firm active from 1932 to 1937 during the first great boom of the American coin-op industry. Released in May 1936, it is a single-player electro-mechanical payout machine -- a game that rewarded winning play with cash, a popular and controversial format in the mid-1930s.
Specific details about the Chase's playfield, rules, and artwork have not survived in the available documentation. As a payout game from 1936, it would have predated flippers by more than a decade, with play centering on landing the ball in winning positions to trigger an award.
Very little else is known about the Pamco Chase beyond its existence in PAMCO's catalog. Its obscurity is itself a piece of pinball history: hundreds of Depression-era games came and went quickly, and machines like the Chase remind us how much of the industry's earliest chapter remains to be rediscovered.