Chuck-O-Luck

The Chuck-O-Luck, manufactured by D. Gottlieb & Company in early 1932, is one of the earliest games in Gottlieb's long pinball history. As a Pure Mechanical (PM) machine, it predates the electromechanical era entirely, operating with no electrical components at all. Unusually, it is a table top counter game with a vertical playfield, standing roughly 14 inches tall according to the book Drop Coin Here, and it resembles a pachinko game more than a traditional pinball machine. Because it has pins, pinballs, and a ball shooter, however, it is still classified as a pinball game.

Gameplay is simple: the player launches balls up into the vertical playfield with the shooter and watches them cascade down through the pins toward scoring positions. There are no flippers or electrical scoring mechanisms of any kind, as this game predates such inventions by more than a decade. Its small size and vertical format may explain why it does not appear in all pinball reference works; in the Encyclopedia of Pinball Vol. 1, author Dick Bueschel writes that Gottlieb was making Chuck-O-Luck by late 1931, though the game is absent from that volume's exhaustive list of 1930-1933 pinball machines.

Little is known about the game's original artwork or designer. Even so, its age and unusual format make it an interesting artifact from the very beginning of Gottlieb's rise as one of pinball's most influential manufacturers.