50/50

The 50/50, produced by G. M. Laboratories, Incorporated of Chicago in November 1935, is an obscure single-player electro-mechanical pinball machine from a short-lived manufacturer that operated only from 1935 to 1936. Games from small Chicago makers of this period are poorly documented, and the 50/50 is no exception.

Little is known about the machine's specific features, rules, or appearance. As an electro-mechanical game of the mid-1930s, it would have used electrical contacts and solenoid or light-based features of some kind - the technology that was then beginning to distinguish newer games from the purely mechanical marble games of just a few years earlier - but no detailed record of its playfield survives in the available data.

For collectors and historians, the 50/50 is interesting precisely because of its obscurity: it represents the crowded, fast-moving mid-1930s coin-op market, in which dozens of small companies like G. M. Laboratories appeared, released a handful of games, and vanished.