EP168: From Bagatelle to Video Games: The History of Pinball, These Guys Use Dungeons and Dragons as a Therapy Tool and Ethics: Bill Daniels and the Utah Stars
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jeremy Saucier of the Strong Museum of Play shares the long, and surprising, history of pinball--from its origins in French parlor games, to its prohibition, and then to its emergence as the immersive and popular game that it is today. Adam Davis and Adam Johns met in grad school at Antioch University, and they've been using table-top games as a tool to encourage personal growth, teamwork, and problem solving. The late owner of the ABA’s Utah Stars, Bill Daniels, shares why he paid back all of the bankrupt team’s creditors… even though he had no legal obligation to do so.
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Time Codes:
00:00 - From Bagatelle to Video Games: The History of Pinball
10:00 - These Guys Use Dungeons and Dragons as a Therapy Tool
35:00 - Ethics: Bill Daniels and the Utah Stars
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. |
| 0:18.8 | And that includes your story. Send them to Our American Stories.com. |
| 0:22.5 | They're some of our favorites. Jeremy Saucere is the assistant vice president for |
| 0:27.7 | interpretation and electronic games. And he's also the editor of the American Journal of Play |
| 0:34.1 | at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. |
| 0:38.5 | Today, he gives us the exciting history of an American icon, |
| 0:43.1 | an American original, The Pinball Machine. |
| 0:50.5 | I would say pinball is an American icon. |
| 0:55.0 | It traces its roots back to a French parlor table game called Bagateau. |
| 1:03.0 | Sometimes it would be in a form that looks similar to a pool table. |
| 1:07.0 | The player would get to hit a ball, often with something that resembled |
| 1:11.5 | acoustic that we would use today in pool. Initially the idea was to avoid pins. There'd be these |
| 1:17.9 | little wooden pins and a lot of different versions of the game. And eventually that evolved |
| 1:23.5 | into where you actually had fixed pins and scoring holes. |
| 1:31.3 | The kind of link that, you know, if you were to say a missing link, |
| 1:35.3 | between Bagotel and Pinball happens in the late 19th century |
| 1:40.3 | with an English immigrant to America, Monagyu Redgrave. |
| 1:45.0 | He patents in 1871 what he called improvements in Bagotel. |
| 1:52.0 | And that introduced the spring-loaded ball shooter, what today we would refer to as the plunger. |
| 1:59.0 | The idea of also adding sound effects or sound to the game by putting bells on the playfield. |
| 2:06.2 | The first pinball machines made this type of game into a coin-operated machine. |
| 2:14.2 | It took that playfield and it essentially monetized it, right? |
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