Fire Alarm

Fire Alarm is a single-player electro-mechanical pinball machine released by D. Gottlieb & Company in February 1939. It pairs two significant names of pinball's golden age: designer Harry Mabs, who would later invent the flipper for Gottlieb's 1947 'Humpty Dumpty', and artist Roy Parker, whose playful illustration style defined the look of Gottlieb games for decades.

Details of Fire Alarm's playfield and rules are not well documented. As a 1939 game, it predates the flipper by eight years, so play would have been the gravity-driven, pre-war style: launch the ball and watch it work its way down through whatever scoring features the layout offered, likely with electrically powered scoring typical of late-1930s Gottlieb production.

For historians, Fire Alarm's chief interest lies in its credits. It is an early collaboration between Mabs and Parker, made nearly a decade before the pair's work would help usher in the modern era of pinball - a modest but genuine piece of the Gottlieb story.