Contention

The Contention pinball machine, designed by Harry Mabs and manufactured by D. Gottlieb & Company in May 1940, comes from the pre-flipper era of electro-mechanical pinball. Games of this period challenged players to send balls through the playfield using only the plunger and careful nudging, as flippers would not appear in the industry until 1947 -- an innovation later credited to Contention's own designer, Harry Mabs, on Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty.

Contention paired Mabs' design work with artwork by Roy Parker, the prolific artist whose backglass and playfield art defined Gottlieb's look for decades. Little detailed information about the game's specific features survives, which is common for machines of this vintage.

As a single-player electro-mechanical game from a prominent manufacturer, Contention remains an interesting piece of the pinball history puzzle, offering a glimpse into Gottlieb's output in the years just before World War II halted game production.