Yuma Arizona

The United Manufacturing Company's "Yuma Arizona" from May 1950 is an electro-mechanical pinball machine with genuinely unusual mechanics, featuring artwork by George Molentin. Its playfield layout is shared with United's 1949 'Utah' and 'Tampico', and the game offers five balls per play.

The game's central gimmick involves ten numbered lights on the playfield housed under plastic shields that look like the round passive bumpers of later games but contain no moving parts except a ball-activated switch; the ball never actually touches the housing. All ten lights are lit at the start of the game and are numbered in pairs: hitting one light of a pair turns both off. When all the numbered lights have been extinguished, the next letter of A-R-I-Z-O-N-A lights up on both the playfield and backglass, and all the numbers relight for another round. Meanwhile, four lit Y-U-M-A rollovers in the lower playfield spell out the city name on the backglass. Two flippers, four pop bumpers, and two kick-out holes round out the playfield.

The flippers themselves are a curiosity. United called them "Control Kickers": each consists of a rubber ring stretched between two metal posts on a flat steel bar, mounted reversed with the stationary ends on the inside. Unlike impulse flippers, they can be held in the up position, and pressing either cabinet button activates both flippers at once. For fans of early flipper-era oddities, Yuma Arizona is a fascinating study in how manufacturers were still experimenting with the flipper concept in 1950.