That Time America Outlawed Pinball (2016)

I have to wonder if this applies to private collectors. As drafted, it sounds like removing the coin mechanism[0] would be enough to dodge the ban if you just happened to have a pinball machine collection for private use.

Though the idea of police officers raiding someone's pinball machine collection sounds both hilarious and heinously overreaching at the same time.

[0] To be clear, this law probably would apply to freeplay arcades that charge for entry and electronic arcade money systems like Intercard's swipers or the ones that operate on save data cards in Japan.

Did you put this together? It looks great. The site our village uses to host its village code is an atrocity so I’ve been considering rolling my own unofficial version.

And pinball back then was pretty similar to pachinko, according to the article.

"Before the advent of flippers in 1947, pinball was a considerably different game from what it is today. Except for tipping the machines, players were at the mercy of the random bounce of the ball. Players gambled on games, and operators handed out prizes from free games and gum all the way up to jewelry and chinaware."

Might be surprising to young people who are used to people casually gambling on sports 24/7 using their phone.

Crazy how gambling went from a highly restricted thing to a full blown, anytime, anywhere, no restrictions thing without any federal legislation (that I am aware of).

Also the museum in Alameda CA, which does a good job of walking you through the history of the ban.

Unfortunately the official History channel website always redirects you to the Latin American version, preventing people with a Latin American IP address to access any US content.

That's actually what the History Channel airs on cable in the US. It was originally a serious channel that covered history but now shows conspiracy nonsense and shows about pawn shops. It's one of the most infamous examples of network decay along with "Music Television" which now plays crappy reality shows instead of music videos. Before the History Channel became the conspiracy nonsense channel, it was basically the Hitler Channel because talking ad nauseum about World War 2 brought in more ratings than other historical topics.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/t6wmv8/when_did... and https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/437715-grassley-mocks-th... for evidence of the channel's current reputation in the US.