Where plinko came from
Search the word and the results split cleanly in two. Half are casino pages. Half are television clips, wikis about a game show, and people arguing about a board built in 1983.
Both halves are about the same object. The casino version is the younger one by four decades.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
3 January 1983
Plinko was first played on the American game show The Price Is Right on that date. It was devised by Frank Wayne, who had been the show's executive producer since its 1972 premiere and who stayed in the job until his death in 1988. Wikipedia's entry on him is blunt about the credit: he created the show's most popular pricing game, and a good many others besides.
The name came from the sound. Before the first play, host Bob Barker explained that a disc coming down a board of metal pins makes a plink — and that was the whole derivation. It is one of the few game names in either television or gambling that is straightforwardly onomatopoeic.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
How the television game worked
A contestant was handed one flat disc, and could earn up to four more by pricing small prizes: each prize came with a two-digit price in which one digit was wrong, and picking the correct digit won both the prize and another disc.
Then came the board. The contestant climbed to a platform, held a disc against the top edge, and let go. It clattered down through the pins into one of nine slots at the bottom, each holding a cash amount, with the largest in the middle.
That last detail is worth pausing on, because the screen version inverts it.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
The prize kept climbing
At launch the top slot was worth $25,000 — the largest prize the show had offered, and the largest the network's rules then permitted. The ceiling moved in steps afterwards: $50,000 in 1984, $75,000 in 1986, $100,000 in 1990, $125,000 in 1992.
It is a small piece of television history that explains the game's stature. For most of the 1980s, Plinko was the biggest thing a contestant could walk into on that stage, and it became the show's best-known segment as a result.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
What the casino version kept, and what it flipped
The shape survived intact: a triangle of pins, a disc or ball released from the top, slots along the bottom. So did the essential appeal, which is that you are watching a physical process you cannot influence.
Two things changed.
The slots hold multipliers, not amounts. On television, a slot was worth what it said. On a screen board, a slot multiplies whatever you staked — so the same board serves a hundred-rupee round and a ten-thousand-rupee one.
The big prize moved to the edges. The television board put its largest amount in the centre, where discs most often landed; that is what made it a generous prize game. Screen boards put their largest multiplier at the two outer slots, where a ball almost never lands, and put the smallest — sometimes zero — in the middle. The arithmetic of that inversion is the single biggest difference between the two games, and it is not visible from a photograph of either.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
Why the split search results matter
If you are looking for rules and you land on a page about the 1983 board, you will read about nine slots, cash amounts and a platform you climb. None of that describes the game in a lobby. If you are looking for the television history and you land on a casino page, you get ladders and return percentages that never applied to the show.
The two are related the way a card game is related to a licensed card-game app: the same shape, different stakes, different maths.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
One thing both versions share
Nobody can steer the disc. There is no release angle that works, no lucky spot on the top edge, no reading of the board. Contestants have believed otherwise on television for forty years and players believe it on screens now, and the belief is the same size in both places.
What makes a pin board compelling is exactly that you are not participating in the outcome, only in the release. Wayne built a very good piece of television out of that, and the casino industry noticed.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
Sources
- Frank Wayne's role and the creation credit: Wikipedia.
- First play date, the origin of the name, the disc-earning rules and the prize ceilings: The Price Is Right Wiki.
