Credit

Rock-ola Manufacturing Corporation's 'Credit', released in July 1936, comes from the Chicago company's brief 1932-1938 run as a pinball maker, before it became famous for jukeboxes. Credit is a flipperless, one-ball payout machine, placing it firmly in the gambling side of the 1930s coin-op trade rather than the amusement side that pinball would later settle into.

The economics were simple: one ball for five cents. Its most curious feature is a consolation mechanic in which losing ten balls in a row registers 50 credits, a hedge that kept unlucky players feeding coins into the machine. Features like this illustrate how mid-1930s payout games blurred the line between pinball and slot-machine gambling, the very association that would soon bring pinball bans to many American cities.

Details regarding Credit's artwork and cabinet design are scarce, but as a surviving example of Rock-ola's short-lived pinball era, it remains an interesting artifact of the industry's freewheeling early years.