Dingbat

The Dingbat, manufactured by A.M. Walzer Company of St. Paul, Minnesota in 1932, is an early example of a "bat game" — a category of coin-operated amusement devices that predates the electromechanical pinball era. The earliest known reference to it appears in a December 1932 issue of Billboard, and a March 1933 Automatic Age article describes it as new, likely referencing its display at the February 1933 Coin Machine Show in Chicago.

Gameplay on the Dingbat centers on a distinctive pitching mechanism: the ball is pitched from above the playfield down a metal slide, and the player bats the airborne ball into the bleachers to score, creating a baseball-themed experience. A similar game, Atlas Indicator's 1931 'Baseball', suggests the Dingbat was part of a small wave of bat-and-ball coin machines of the early 1930s rather than a singular pioneering invention.

Housed in a compact cabinet measuring 41 by 20 by 21 inches, the Dingbat is a single-player Pure Mechanical (PM) machine that offers a window into the earliest, pre-electromechanical era of pinball-adjacent amusement devices.