Manhattan

'Manhattan' was the last flipperless game made by United before they started making flipper games, beginning with United's 1948 'Wisconsin'. Pictured here is a game with flippers retrofitted at the bottom of the playfield. Each flipper has its own solenoid for individual operation. The right flipper assembly is inelegantly mounted against the ball trough. A previous owner stated this game was on a farm for decades and even spent time in an old bus, supporting the expectation that this retrofit happened a long time ago. In the envelope that accompanied this game were several apron cards, two of them pictured here, that point out the "control kicker" and replay buttons. These same cards appeared on United's flipper games that soon followed. If the retrofit flipper kit was sold by United, we could expect the kit to include these cards, to find their way into the envelope. Or maybe United installed these flippers themselves, as an experiment for the impending sales of these kits. After all, the wires to the flipper solenoids were nicely laced into the nearby cables. The serial number on this game is 4074, a relatively high number compared to the few other serial numbers of which we are aware for this production run. Perhaps United plucked this game from the tail end of the production run and experimented. This is merely fun speculation, as the flippers more likely were added by an operator or even by a distributor.