Pee Wee

The Pee Wee is an early table-top/counter pinball machine dating to February 1932, according to Dick Bueschel's Encyclopedia of Pinball. Its manufacturer is unknown, and it predates the flipper era and much of the equipment that would come to define pinball's later golden age. As one of the earliest documented pinball-style games, it is a notable find for historians and collectors, though it should not be confused with Genco's unrelated 1946 machine of the same name.

Being a small table-top/counter game from 1932, its gameplay was necessarily simple: purely mechanical operation, with the ball propelled and scored by fixed pins and pockets rather than any powered mechanism -- flippers and other electromechanical features were still years away from being introduced to pinball. Scores were likely tallied manually by the operator or player, and the design and artwork of the machine were probably minimal, in keeping with the small, low-cost counter games of the period.

Because of the scarcity of records from 1932, specific details about Pee Wee's designer, theme, or exact features remain unknown. Its survival and continued interest among collectors nonetheless serve as a reminder of the earliest, most rudimentary days of the game that would become pinball.