According to The New York Times, Steve Kordek, who revolutionized the game of pinball in the 1940s by designing what became the standard two-flipper machine found in bars and arcades around the world, died on February 19, 2012, at a hospice in Park Ridge, Ill. He was 100.
Mr. Kordek revised a revision of what until the 1930s had been called the pin game. In that version a player would pull a plunger to release the ball, then shake the table in an often frustrating attempt to redirect the ball toward a scoring target—typically a cup or a hole.
In 1947, two designers at the D. Gottlieb & Company pinball factory, Harry Mabs and Wayne Neyens, transformed that game into a game called Humpty Dumpty, adding electromechanical flippers, three on each side from the top to the bottom of the field. It was an instant hit, until at a trade show in 1948, Mr. Kordek introduced Triple Action, a game that featured just two flippers both controlled by buttons at the bottom of the table. Mr. Kordek was designing for Genco at the time, one of a dozen pinball manufacturers in Chicago.
Mr. Kordek’s two-flipper game was less expensive to produce and also gave players greater control. For someone concentrating on keeping the ball from going into the drain, the two flippers were better than six.
“It was really revolutionary, and pretty much everyone else followed suit,” David Silverman, executive director of the National Pinball Museum in Baltimore, said in an interview. “And it’s stayed the standard for 60 years.”
Mr. Kordek’s career spanned more than six decades, going on to lead design teams that created more than 100 games—at Genco and later for Bally Manufacturing and Williams Manufacturing—many of which were very successful. Among them are Space Mission, Grand Prix, Contact, and Pokerino.
“Steve’s impact would be comparable to D.W. Griffith moving from silent films through talkies and color and CinemaScope and 3-D with computer-generated graphics,” said Roger Sharpe, author of “Pinball!” (1977), a history of the industry, said. “He moved through each era seamlessly.”
