Cowboy

The Cowboy pinball machine is an early electro-mechanical (EM) game from J. H. Keeney and Company Incorporated of Chicago. Produced in August 1939, it is a flipperless, single-player machine built around a rodeo theme, a sports subject that fit the era's taste for Western Americana. Its pre-war production date places it firmly in pinball's formative years, nearly a decade before flippers transformed the game.

The Cowboy gives the player five balls per play, the standard format of the day. As a flipperless game, play centered on skillful plunging and nudging rather than flipper control, and specific details about its original rules and scoring are not recorded, leaving enthusiasts to piece together its intended playstyle through observation of surviving examples.

As a 1939 Keeney, Cowboy stands as a document of pinball's early days, when manufacturers were still exploring how far a coin-operated ball game could go before the technology of the post-war years arrived.