Frisco

Frisco, released by Chicago's Marvel Manufacturing Company in June 1946, is an interesting artifact of a very particular moment in pinball history. It is a World War II-era conversion game: rather than building a machine from scratch, Marvel supplied new artwork and theming to refurbish existing games, and Frisco could be built on any of ten different Gottlieb machines from 1940-41, including 'The Champ,' 'Horoscope,' 'School Days,' 'Belle Hop,' 'Miami Beach,' and 'A-B-C Bowler.' Conversions like this kept operators supplied when wartime restrictions had halted new game production.

Frisco is a flipperless, single-player electro-mechanical game offering five balls per play, in keeping with the standards of its day. Its theme celebrates American Places, with San Francisco as its namesake. Distributor ads in Billboard show the game was announced as "coming soon" in early June 1946 and available "for immediate delivery" by the end of that month, shortly before Marvel moved into new Chicago headquarters on Fullerton Avenue.

While no designer or artist is credited, Frisco remains a charming window into the immediate postwar coin-op business, when small companies like Marvel bridged the gap between wartime scarcity and the flipper era that would begin the following year.