Poko-Lite

The Poko-Lite, manufactured by the Glickman Company of Philadelphia in December 1937, is a one-player electro-mechanical, flipperless pinball machine with a poker/playing-cards theme — the score display shows playing cards rather than numeric points, a distinctive touch for the era.

Poko-Lite is a conversion of two earlier Bally machines, 'Bumper' (1936) and 'Skipper' (1937), reworked with 11 scoring bumpers. Since flippers had not yet been invented, gameplay relied on positioning and the layout of bumpers and targets rather than flipper control.

Little is documented about the game's designer, and Glickman Company appears to have been active for only a short period (1937-1938), making Poko-Lite a fairly obscure but interesting example of late-1930s conversion games built on Bally hardware.