Excel

The Excel, manufactured by the Daval Manufacturing Co. of Chicago in October 1936, is an obscure single-player pinball machine from the game's prewar era. Daval was one of the many Chicago coin-machine firms of the 1930s, operating from 1934 to 1939, and the Excel is a product of the middle of that short run.

Very little is documented about the Excel's gameplay, artwork, or theme. As an electro-mechanical machine of 1936 vintage, it predates flippers by more than a decade; play would have centered on launching balls onto the playfield and hoping skillful aim and a little nudging guided them into scoring positions, with electrical circuits handling scoring functions that purely mechanical games could not.

The short life of its manufacturer and the scarcity of surviving documentation make the Excel a genuinely obscure entry in pinball history - one of the many largely forgotten titles from the industry's crowded, fast-moving early years in Chicago.