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Silver King

(Click on image to enlarge it)

Automat Games, c. 1938 (becoming Automatic Games in 1939, and then Silver King Corp. in 1945), 14". The Silver King is, in general, a common machine, although some specific versions are uncommon. All versions had a simple mechanism that required the customer to insert a coin and then swing a lever to the left.

The Silver King line started with a pre-war version like the yellow and green examples above. It's a solid, heavy model made of painted or (in these cases) porcelainized cast iron. Production stopped during WWII, and after the war the machine appeared from the newly renamed Silver King Corporation as the aluminum version above right. As far as I can tell, the 2 versions differ only in the material they're made of, some small differences in ornamentation of the base, and the gate. The cast iron examples I've seen have all taken a penny, but I've seen penny and nickel versions of the aluminum version. I don't know if parts are interchangable between these versions.

The pre-war cast iron version is much less common than the later aluminum version, which is fairly common. On a previous version of this page I'd written "for the cast iron version, porcelainized examples seem to be much less common than painted examples," but updating this in November 2023 I'm not sure that's true. I don't see many of the porcelainized or painted versions and would be hard-pressed to choose either one as less common than the other. Among the porcelain colors I've seen are green, black, yellow, orange, and white. You can see a line-up here, and one that its owner calls "turquoise" here. Other colors may exist but I can't recall seeing or hearing of them.

The yellow example above is the second porcelainized example I've had, but I was only a transient owner of the first one. I found it in a Garden Grove, CA, antique store that had only furniture except for 2 old vending machines on a table against the back wall. I didn't see them right away, and I remember thinking as I walked into the store, well, this place isn't gonna have what I want. Wrong! One machine was a red Northwestern 33 Peanut, the other was a green porcelain Silver King. I wanted the Silver King but at the time I had a deal with my wife---she'd let me spread machines throughout the house and in exchange I wouldn't buy anything that color because she hated it. So I called my friend Dan and asked if he wanted it. He said "yes," as anyone with any sense would say, so I bought it and passed it to him next time I saw him. In retrospect I should have bought it for myself, anticipating that we'd move to Indiana a few years later and buy a house with a basement where I could put all the machines she didn't like, but I wasn't that clever. I've since learned, and did manage to correct the mistake 25 years later.

Two musical versions exist, both of them variations of the post-war aluminum machine. One has a ballerina in a plastic case atop the lid, and when a portion is vended the ballerina spins and music plays from inside the machine. You can see a picture here, a close-up of the ballerina here, and an even closer close-up here. The other version plays music when a portion is vended but it doesn't have the ballerina. This latter version looks exactly like the common aluminum version except for musical notes on the decal. Both of these models are uncommon.

Lastly, there's the one-of-a-kind Candy here and here. That's her name and her game, and she's one of Dan's favorites. I don't know her history with full certainty, but I do know it was love at first sight. I think Dan rescued her from an old boyfriend who used to feed her slugs and laugh when she jammed. She's a hardbody, as you can see.

The porcelain examples above are 100% original. The aluminum example top right has been restored.