Flipper

Markepp Manufacturing Company's "Flipper" (July 1941) is a pure mechanical coin-operated tabletop/counter game, not a pinball machine, despite its ironic name — flippers as a pinball feature were still six years away from being introduced. It's a fascinating curiosity from the immediate pre-flipper era of coin-op games, offering a glimpse of the mechanical pin games that predated the pinball industry as we now know it.

Gameplay is simple: for one cent, a player drops a coin at the top of a small vertical playfield, where it falls through a maze of pins to land in scoring pockets at the bottom — a mechanism closer to a bagatelle or coin-drop game than to flipper pinball. A trade report in The Billboard (Aug-2-1941) noted the game had been presented to the trade "last week," helping pin down its debut to late July 1941.

Little else is documented about Markepp Manufacturing or this particular game's designer, but "Flipper" remains an intriguing artifact from the years just before flippers themselves reshaped the pinball industry.