Tally Roll
About This Machine
The Tally Roll, produced by Firestone Enterprises, Inc. in July 1946, is a single-player electro-mechanical (EM) rolldown game. The manufacturer had recently renamed itself from G.F.G Skill Games to Firestone Games Inc. at the end of June 1946, announcing Tally Roll's production alongside two skee-ball games at the same time. Distributors began advertising it in showrooms starting August 10, 1946.
As a rolldown game, Tally Roll's gameplay centers on players rolling the ball to accumulate points across scoring lanes, a simpler and more accessible format than flipper pinball of the era. The machine's mechanical scoring components reflect the kind of EM rolldown designs common among amusement manufacturers in the mid-1940s.
Firestone's run with pinball appears to have been brief; the company changed its name again to Firestone Enterprises Inc. in October 1946, and by 1947 seems to have shifted to manufacturing coin-operated radios, with no further Billboard activity found after September 1947. This makes Tally Roll a short-lived but notable artifact of a manufacturer's brief foray into pinball.