Pacific Amusement's Major League Pinball

My apologies for the quietness in some of these videos. Play shown at 2:25.

Major League was produced by the Pacific Amusement Manufacturing Company (PAMCO) in 1934 as a follow up to their wildly popular game Contact. Contact was designed by a young Harry Williams, and Los Angeles-based PAMCO produced it under contract for the west coast markets. Contact was the first commercially successful pin game to use electricity, with a solenoid and bell. It ultimately sold 30,000 units.

Major League was PAMCO's offering immediately following, and it was also in high demand. The only problem was-- PAMCO couldn't deliver. Why? It's not entirely clear.

In the first version of this game produced, the player was required to load a ball on home plate before hitting any pocket to advance that ball. Otherwise, the solenoids kicked but there was no ball to run the bases! The second version of this game, the one in the video here, kept a ball on home base at all times, ready to be kicked. Was the original version of this game a unpopular with players? Is that why it was redesigned? The literature on this machine suggests that there were "mechanical issues." Was there something else causing mechanical problems that required reengineering, or was it simply an unpopular design?

Either way, this hampered PAMCO's ability to produce and deliver the machine. Was it still popular? Certainly. Many examples of this machine still exist, indicating that many were produced. How many? I would speculate in the thousands, as at this time, PAMCO was building games both in LA and Chicago. But certainly nowhere near the number of Contacts produced. (The interesting thing to me is-- of the five to ten examples I've seen of this machine, this is the only one that is the newer model.)