Unknown (“Four Crowns”)

This unnamed A.B.T. Manufacturing Company payout machine, nicknamed 'Four Crowns' after its hand-painted playfield artwork depicting four crowns, dates to April 1935 based on a penciled date found inside its coin box. It's an electro-mechanical payout game that awards ten balls per play.

What makes this machine especially interesting isn't rarity alone, but the story behind its playfield: a March 1936 article in The Coin Machine Journal describes a contest A.B.T. held, inviting artists to paint the most beautiful playfields using several of the company's games, as an experiment to boost operator profits. This 'Four Crowns' playfield shares its design layout with another documented contest entry, 'Four Roses,' suggesting both games were painted for the same contest rather than altered after the fact by later owners.

Missing its front coin door, and with its original batteries long since replaced by a transformer, this surviving example is a rare physical record of A.B.T.'s mid-1930s marketing experiment — a hand-painted playfield that may or may not have won its artist a prize, but has certainly outlived the contest itself.