Galloping Plugs

Galloping Plugs, produced by the Pacific Amusement Manufacturing Company (PAMCO) of Chicago in April 1936, is an electro-mechanical payout machine from the later years of the company's brief 1932-1937 existence. As a payout game, it belongs to the gambling side of the 1930s coin-op business: machines of this type dispensed coin awards directly to players, a category that flourished mid-decade before mounting legal pressure pushed the industry toward free-play and novelty designs.

Little documentation of the game survives - IPDB records no designer, artwork details, or feature list. Its name, however, offers a hint of its flavor: 'plugs' was period slang for horses, suggesting the horse racing motif common to many payout machines of the era, which mimicked the excitement of betting on the races. Like other pre-flipper games of 1936, play would have consisted of shooting balls onto a playfield of scoring positions with no flippers to influence the outcome.

As one of the more obscure entries in PAMCO's catalog, Galloping Plugs is a reminder of how much of the 1930s coin machine trade operated in the gray zone between amusement and gambling - a corner of pinball prehistory that largely disappeared, but that shaped the laws and public attitudes the flipper era later had to overcome.