Chico Derby

The Chico Derby, produced by Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing Company in September 1937, comes from the formative pre-flipper days of pinball. An electro-mechanical (EM) single-player game with a horse racing theme, it shows the game evolving from its humble bagatelle origins toward the more complex, mechanically-driven machines that followed.

Chicago Coin, one of the longest-running names in the industry (1932-1977), built a confirmed 1,459 units of Chico Derby, model number 39. A companion release, Chico Races, appeared the same month as the novelty-play version of this game.

Horse racing was a popular theme for coin-operated games of the late 1930s, tapping into the excitement of the track at a time when payout and replay features were hotly debated — some cities even outlawed pin games entirely. As a documented survivor of that colorful era, Chico Derby offers historians and collectors a window into pinball's earliest boom years.