Unknown
About This Machine
This enigmatic Pure Mechanical bagatelle, believed to be a French-Chinese game from the middle-to-late 1860s, stands as one of the earliest and most mysterious artifacts in pinball's prehistory. Its manufacturer is unknown, and its anonymity only adds to its intrigue for collectors and historians.
As a bagatelle, gameplay would have involved launching a ball via a plunger into a field of pins, with the ball's path governed by gravity rather than any player-controlled flippers, which had not yet been invented. Its exact scoring and playfield layout are not documented.
The absence of information about its theme, design, or art only adds to the allure. Whether it was a commercial product or something closer to a prototype or one-off remains unknown, and much about this piece of early bagatelle history is still left to be discovered.