Discovery

Discovery, produced in September 1935 by the Pacific Amusement Manufacturing Company (PAMCO) of Chicago, is an artifact from the earliest years of coin-operated pinball. PAMCO operated only from 1932 to 1937, and Discovery represents the period when pinball was rapidly evolving from simple countertop marble games into electrically enhanced amusement machines.

Notably, Discovery is a payout machine: rather than awarding only points or replays, it could dispense coin awards to players, a category of game that flourished briefly in the mid-1930s before attracting legal scrutiny in many jurisdictions. As a single-player electro-mechanical game built more than a decade before the invention of the flipper, its gameplay would have relied on plunger skill and chance rather than ball control.

One documented detail adds to its story: in November 1935, just two months after the game's release, a conversion replacement playfield was produced for Discovery - a common practice of the era that let operators refresh a machine's earning power without buying a whole new game. Little else is documented about Discovery's design or artwork, but it remains an interesting window into pinball's payout-machine era.