Saluting Steve Kordek, the man who gave us pinball

Steve Kordek, who has died aged 100, was the man who transformed pinball from a clunking tabletop variant on the French game bagatelle to the hugely popular all-American entertainment of today.

Bells, ramps, buzzers, multi-ball levels, movie tie-ins and complicated storylines are now integral parts of pinball in an industry which, having weathered the arrival of video games, is worth billions of pounds each year. But when Kordek joined the business, in 1937, so-called "pin games" were in their infancy, with players pulling a plunger to release a ball which they would then try to guide into scoring cups or holes.

At the height of the Depression, such games were popular because they were so cheap (a penny to play) and also because men bet on the outcomes - something that later attracted rumours of mob involvement in the business and encouraged the unwanted attentions of the police.

Kordek's own 60-year career in pinball design, however, was wholly innocent, and began by pure chance.

The eldest of 10 children of a Polish immigrant, Steve Kordek was born on Boxing Day 1911 in Chicago, where he was educated at Weber High School. As a young man he worked with the Forestry Service in Idaho but, by 1937, he was back in his home town looking for a job. Walking down the street after a fruitless day, he was caught in a torrential downpour. Too poor to own an umbrella, he took shelter in the nearest building. It happened to be the headquarters of Genco - the pin game manufacturer. "I had never seen a pin game before in my life," Kordek later confessed, but while he waited out the rain, the receptionist asked if he was looking for a job. Soon he was soldering parts on the Genco production line, from which he moved to the games' design and engineering department.

In 1947 the pin game took a great leap forward when two designers at a rival manufacturer to Genco came up with "Humpty Dumpty", a variant which added three pairs of flippers in the body of the game to allow players to guide the silver ball around the table. Then, two months before the pinball trade fair of 1948, Genco's chief designer fell ill, and Kordek was drafted in to come up with a machine to top Humpty Dumpty.

He did so by stripping out the top two pairs of flippers, leaving just two electrically-powered flippers at the bottom of the table to prevent the ball rolling into the 'gutter'. With that simple change, on a game called "Triple Action", Kordek made pinball a defensive game, with players attempting to prevent the inevitable and keep the ball in play.

In the decades that followed, Kordek designed nearly 100 different pinball games for Genco, then Bally, and later Williams - all based in Chicago, the global hub of the industry. Apart from the flipper revolution, he also came up with two other innovations which helped keep pinball fans coming back for more. The first, for "Vagabond" in 1962, was the "drop target", in which players scored a bonus by hitting a series of obstructions with the ball, making them disappear, or drop, into the body of the table.

The second, the following year for "Beat the Clock", was his introduction of the multi-ball bonus round, in which players who completed certain tasks were rewarded with up to six balls on the table at the same time, creating mayhem but also the opportunity to rack up huge points totals.

By the 1970s Kordek was designing up to 20 pinball games each year, including, in 1976, "Space Mission", said to be his personal favourite. The game came in the wake of the Apollo-Soyuz space mission of 1975, and according to Larry DeMar, a colleague of Kordek's at Williams, "it was not only a big hit, it was his pride and joy".

By the 1980s, however, pinball was suddenly confronted with a new and potentially fatal challenge - video games. But after an initial dip, pinball recovered to claim about a third of the arcade game market. Having cemented their position, the games themselves became ever more sophisticated - principally as branded merchandise for high-profile films or rock bands. Thus the releases of such movies as Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, or Dracula, were accompanied by pinball games featuring animated graphics, specific obstacles (in the Jurassic Park game a Tyrannosaurus rex consumes a ball), and recorded expostulations from Richard Attenborough, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gary Oldman.

"In [the old] days, maybe three people designed a game," Kordek said at the time. "Today, it's 25 or 30. We have a series of programmers who concentrate only on music or speech or effects."

Even in his late 80s, Kordek kept abreast of all these developments, taking night classes to learn about the development of software that became an increasing part of the games. He eventually became the archivist at Williams, retiring in 1999. He was reportedly still designing four years later, however, contributing to his last game, "Vacation America", in 2003.

Steve Kordek married Harriet Pieniazek in 1941. She died in 2003, and he is survived by their two daughters and two sons.

Steve Kordek, born December 26 1911, died February 19 2012