Ditto

Ditto, produced by the Rock-ola Manufacturing Corporation of Chicago in March 1936, comes from the brief period when the famous jukebox maker was also a pinball manufacturer. Rock-ola built pin games only from 1932 to 1938, and Ditto is one of the company's lesser-documented titles from that window.

As a single-player game from 1936, Ditto predates the flipper by more than a decade, so play centered on launching balls with the plunger and letting gravity and nudging do the rest. Each game gave the player 10 balls per play - a common format of the era, in which players shot their supply of balls one at a time and tallied their total score across all of them.

Very little else is documented about Ditto's design, theme, or production. Like many mid-1930s pin games, it survives mostly as a name and a date, but it remains a small piece of the story of how Depression-era Chicago manufacturers, Rock-ola among them, shaped the earliest days of the pinball industry.