Pinball Trivia
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59 free Pinball trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pinball was once illegal in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, its flippers were invented by accident, and one machine sold more than 20,000 units. This quiz covers the whole silver-ball story: bagatelle and the spring plunger, Baffle Ball and Ballyhoo, Contact's first solenoids, Humpty Dumpty's flippers, La Guardia's sledgehammer, Roger Sharpe's courtroom shot, and the microprocessor games that dragged the hobby into the digital age. You will also be quizzed on the parts and the lingo: tilt bobs, nudging, slingshots, knockers, wizard modes and the match feature, then the classics of the 1990s: The Addams Family, Twilight Zone's Powerball, FunHouse's Rudy, Medieval Madness and Pinball 2000, plus Williams' exit, Gary Stern, Jersey Jack and the newest boutique makers, with a detour through Pinball Wizard. Easy questions suit anyone who has fed a machine a quarter; the expert tier asks for dates, designers and obscure firsts. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on pinball, its manufacturers and its landmark machines, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on arcade games and on 1980s video games.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pinball table came bundled with Windows from the mid-1990s until Windows XP?
Space Cadet
Space Cadet. It shipped with Windows from the Windows 95 era to XP, and a Microsoft engineer wrote that it was cut after a 64-bit port left the ball passing through objects like a ghost.
Q 02Which French table game is the direct ancestor of pinball?
Bagatelle
Bagatelle. French soldiers fighting in the American Revolution brought their tables with them, and the game spread so widely that a Civil War cartoon showed Lincoln playing it.
Q 03Which Japanese game is pinball's upright cousin, thought to derive from a Western pin table?
Pachinko
Pachinko. It is thought to have started in 1920s Japan as a children's toy copied from an American pin table, before growing into an adult gambling pastime with parlours of its own.
Q 04Which pinball part features in Montague Redgrave's 1871 patent?
The spring plunger
The spring plunger. Redgrave's table fired the ball with a spring-loaded piston in place of a cue, more than seven decades before the first flippers.
Q 05Which 1931 game, selling for $17.50, became pinball's first major coin-operated hit?
Baffle Ball
Baffle Ball. David Gottlieb couldn't build the penny-a-play countertop game fast enough to fill his orders, so one frustrated distributor went off and made a rival of his own.
Q 06What was the 1932 pinball hit Ballyhoo named after?
A magazine
A magazine. Ray Moloney took the name from a popular title of the day for the game he built when he couldn't get enough of Gottlieb's hit to sell, and the game in turn gave his company its name.
Q 07Which city, home to most of the big pinball makers, banned the game itself for decades?
Chicago
Chicago. About 150 firms were making pin games by the end of 1932, most of them there, and the city lifted its own ban only after New York legalised pinball again in 1976.
Q 08What sounded when a ball dropped into the namesake hole of 1933's pinball game Contact?
Bell
Bell. A ball dropping into the Contact hole closed a battery-powered circuit that rang it and kicked balls trapped in other pockets out towards higher-scoring holes.
Q 09Which 1947 Gottlieb game was the first with electromechanical player-controlled flippers?
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty. Its six flippers sat in pairs up the playfield and faced outwards, and they were so weak that it took all three pairs to work the ball back to the top.
Q 10What do pinball players call losing the ball off the bottom of the playfield?
Draining
Draining. Before flippers arrived in 1947 a player had nothing to bat the ball back with, one reason cities treated early pinball as a game of chance.
Q 11What is the illuminated artwork panel in a pinball machine's upright head called?
The backglass
The backglass. It began as the scoreboard: from the mid-1930s, lights behind the painted glass lit up to show a player's score, long before reels or digital displays.
Q 12Which New York mayor banned pinball in the early 1940s, smashing machines with a sledgehammer?
Fiorello La Guardia
Fiorello La Guardia. He argued that pinball took nickels and dimes meant for children's school lunches, and police raids hauled thousands of machines out of shops and bars.
Q 13Whose courtroom demonstration that pinball took skill helped end New York's ban in 1976?
Roger Sharpe
Q 21Which Guns N' Roses member helped design the band's 1994 pinball machine?
Slash
Slash. Hooked on pinball in the early 1990s, he took the idea to maker Data East himself and is credited among the designers of a table that fires balls with a gun trigger and a rose-shaped handle.
Q 22Which end-of-game pinball feature awards a free game when the last digits of a score equal a random number?
Match
Match. It looks like a one-in-ten shot, but operators can dial the odds down, and newer machines leave the factory set at about 7 per cent.
Q 23What are the lanes at the far sides of a playfield, which lead the ball past the flippers, called?
Outlanes
Outlanes. Some machines guard them with an earned kickback that fires the ball straight back into play, or a button-fired magnet that can catch it on the way past.
Roger Sharpe. A suspicious councilman made him switch to the backup machine, but he still named the lane his next ball would take, hit it, and the council voted to lift the ban.
Q 14Which city's pinball ban was struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1974?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles. California's top court overturned the city's ban in a case that turned on whether pinball was a game of skill or of chance, two years before New York's council lifted its own.
Q 15What did some pinball games award instead of free games, to sidestep anti-gambling laws?
Extra balls
Extra balls. Makers sold these games as Add-A-Ball: a high score bought more play on the same game instead of a free game that an operator might quietly redeem for cash.
Q 16What is the name of the solenoid-driven rod that makes a loud bang when a free game is won?
Knocker
Knocker. It fires against the inside of the cabinet so the whole room hears a win, and on some machines the same crack doubles as an alarm telling the operator something needs attention.
Q 17What hangs inside a metal ring to form the classic tilt sensor of a pinball machine?
A plumb bob
A plumb bob. Shake the cabinet too hard and the hanging weight swings into the ring and completes a circuit; operators slide the bob up or down its rod to set how touchy it is.
Q 18Besides the ball in play, what does a tilt usually cost a pinball player?
The end-of-ball bonus
The end-of-ball bonus. A tilt kills the lights and flippers so the ball rolls helplessly out of play, though modern machines flash a warning or two before it comes to that.
Q 19What do players call shoving a pinball machine to steer the ball without setting off the tilt?
Nudging
Nudging. It ranks with flipper timing and shot choice among the game's core skills, and the tilt sensor was added to punish players who overdo it.
Q 20Which rubber-padded features to the upper left and right of the flippers propel the ball away on impact?
Slingshots
Slingshots. Switches behind the rubber fire a solenoid arm that kicks the ball away, usually toward the opposite slingshot or a side lane where it can be lost.
Q 24Which 1977 game was the best-selling flipper pinball machine until The Addams Family overtook it?
Eight Ball
Eight Ball. The pool-hall hit proved so durable that Bally brought it back in 1981 as Eight Ball Deluxe, itself a favourite that operators kept on location for years.
Q 25What did Data East's 1991 game Checkpoint introduce, letting pinball machines show animations as well as scores?
The dot-matrix display
The dot-matrix display. Its grid of glowing orange dots could run animations and even mini video games, and the storytelling it allowed fed pinball's early-1990s sales boom.
Q 26Which Williams game introduced speech to pinball?
Gorgar
Gorgar. Its demon had a vocabulary of just seven words, and a heartbeat thumping from the cabinet sped up the longer the game went on.
Q 27Which 1980 Williams game by Steve Ritchie was the first solid-state machine with a multilevel playfield?
Black Knight
Black Knight. It also introduced Magna-Save, magnets that a player fires with a button to snatch back a ball heading out of play down the side.
Q 28Which 1930s Bally game replaced pins and scoring holes with the electrified part that still shares its name?
Bumper
Bumper. Its coil-sprung posts racked up points each time the ball struck them, doing away with the nail pins that had given pinball its name.
Q 29Which star of The Addams Family film recorded new dialogue for its 1992 pinball machine?
Raul Julia
Raul Julia. His Gomez talks players through the game with lines written for it, and in 1994 the factory put the machine back into production for a gold-trimmed collectors' run.
Q 30Which Addams Family character picks up the ball and carries it off on the 1992 pinball machine?
Thing
Thing. A mechanical hand comes out of its box to carry the ball away, and in 'Thing Flips' the machine takes over a flipper and plays the shot by itself.