Matching does not go back before flippers. It started in the mid-1950s and was a big craze for pinball, pitch-and-bat baseball, bowling "shuffle alley" games, and even some rifles and bumper pool games. When the craze first started, manufacturers tried to outdo each other with double and triple matches involving additional stepper units. Not really a triple "match" exactly, but if the digits matched, then the game would go further to randomly light a clover symbol, and if that hit, it would go further to randomly light a star, to give one example.

In games where the score was displayed with light-up panels on the backglass, the lowest-order scoring digits (tens of thousands, usually) would have a parallel set of spaces where a star symbol could appear.
https://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=2034&picno=25728
The presence of a "00" panel is an indication that there is a match feature. Games having light-up scoring but no match do not have a "00,000" light.
.................David Marston