An Electromechanical (EM) pinball machine are amongst the first ever electrical ball amusement games ever produced. Unlike pinball machines of today which use complex computing systems and microchips, electromechanical pinball machines rely on countless numbers of switches, relays and miles of wire to operate.
Typical of an electromechanical pinball machines are the signature electrical hum, the mechanical spinning score reels and the sound of bells as points were scored throughout your game.
Even before this, pinball was in its primordial stages when games like bagatelle were popular, as well as the very similar tabletop games very similar to it. Electrical machines of this nature didn’t become properly established until the 30s, and were evolving away from being slightly more advanced bagatelle boards. The first evolution produced what we now know today as ‘Electromechanical pinball machines’. This era laster all the way through until the late 70s where solid state technology began to take over.
As previously stated, electromechanical pinball machines have no electronic ‘brain’ so to speak, and no actual power to actually compute what is happening on the playfield. As a result, the nature of electromechanical tables tends to not be that complicated, and offers very simple, but challenging gameplay.
As a result of their simple gameplay, relatively low popularity nowadays, incredibly meticulous internal design and lack of fault-finding facilities, electromechanical pinball machines are not really a recommended first choice to the new pinball buyer. Their early-days nature make them notoriously difficult to diagnose and fix faults, and unless you know what you’re doing (or know a pinball engineer who does), these can be a very challenging time to keep operating reliably. As a result, we tend to avoid electromechanical machines when it comes to our range.
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