''Humpty Dumpty'' is a

pinball Pinball games are a family of games in which a ball is propelled into a specially designed table where it bounces off various obstacles, scoring points either en route or when it comes to rest. Historically the board was studded with nails call ...

machine released by

Gottlieb Gottlieb (formerly D. Gottlieb & Co.) was an American arcade game corporation based in Chicago, Illinois. It is best known for creating a vast line of pinball machines and arcade games (including ''Q*bert'') throughout much of the 20th century. ...

on October 25, 1947. Named after

Humpty Dumpty Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle, and is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described as such. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from ...

, the nursery rhyme character, it is the first pinball machine to include flippers — invented by Harry Mabs — distinguishing it from earlier

bagatelle Bagatelle (from the Château de Bagatelle) is a billiards-derived indoor table game, the object of which is to get a number of balls (set at nine in the 19th century) past wooden pins (which act as obstacles) into holes that are guarded by wood ...

game machines.

Description

''Humpty Dumpty'' had six of these flippers, referred to as "flipper bumpers" by the company. However, unlike modern pinball tables, they faced outward instead of inward and were not placed at the bottom of the table near the main outhole. Like all early pinball tables, ''Humpty Dumpty'' was constructed with

wood Wood is a structural tissue/material found as xylem in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulosic fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin t ...

and had backlit scoring in preset units of scoring rather than mechanical reel or electronic

LED A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits light when current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy in the form of photons. The color of the light (corresp ...

scoring.

Design team

* Concept: Harry Mabs * Game Design: Harry Mabs * Mechanics: Harry Mabs * Artwork: Roy Parker * Animation: Harry Mabs

Digital version

The table was virtually recreated in pinball simulation video game, ''

Microsoft Pinball Arcade ''Microsoft Pinball Arcade'' is a pinball video game from Microsoft. It was released on December 15, 1998, for Microsoft Windows and in 2001 for the Game Boy Color. The game is a collection of seven real pinball tables licensed by Gottlieb. Thes ...

'', although it was not included in the

Game Boy Color The (GBC or CGB) is an 8-bit handheld game console developed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on October 21, 1998, and to international markets that November. Compared to the original Game Boy, the Game Boy Color features a color TFT scre ...

version of that game.

References

External links

* Gottlieb pinball machines 1947 pinball machines {{pinball-stub