Beatem

Beatem, manufactured by V. P. Distributing Company of St. Louis, Missouri in 1944, is an electro-mechanical (EM) pinball machine produced during World War II, a period when new pinball manufacturing was relatively scarce. Beatem was itself a conversion of Chicago Coin's 1939 game Lucky, a common wartime practice that let distributors repurpose existing hardware rather than manufacture entirely new machines.

As a flipperless EM machine — flippers would not be introduced to pinball until 1947 — Beatem relied on tilt, timing, and the era's electrical contacts and switches to control gameplay rather than player-controlled flippers. Specific details about its playfield layout, art, and theme are not well documented, which is common for wartime conversion games.

Beatem's scarcity and wartime origin make it an interesting artifact for collectors and historians studying how the pinball industry adapted during a period of material shortages and reduced manufacturing, even though it was built atop an already-established late-1930s design.