Bingo Pinballs

This Page Last Updated 05-25-2010

Don Hooker (Main Bally Bingo Designer) talked about working on the “one ball” games (the horse race games) and

I think we can see that in the initial 1951 bingos, where the bulk of the circuitry was underneath the playfields. It looks

like Bally’s 6^th game Frolics was the first upper cabinet with the ubiquitous swinging door we are all use to.

Bright Lights (Game 1), Coney Island (Game 2), Palm Beach (Game 5), and Bright Spot (Game 7) all used a “drop down”

back wall – That was only used on Bright Spot because is was a sister-machine to Bright Lights:

~ The photo above is from my old Coney Island ~

Now Spot-Lite (Game 3) and Atlantic City (Game 4) both had removable back-panels – Removable plywood sheets`

~ The photo above is from my old Atlantic City ~

~ This photo is from Phil Hooper’s image archive and shows a Spot-Lite backbox ~

As stated, Frolics (Game 6) was the start of the swinging-door configuration, followed by Beach Beauty (Game 8)

~ This photo is from Phil Hooper’s image archive and shows the opened Frolics backbox ~

And this opened the door (literally) for Bally to design the more complex games and autotest the subassemblies prior to case-up,

as well as making these much much easier for the operators to maintain and enabled higher-function coin/collection mechanisms.

Don said that “you had to pretest the wired assemblies” because they could still work with one or two wires

connected incorrectly, but the odds were always messed up and never in the house-favor.

~ overall much much smarter ~

Now if you compare this picture of my old Spot-Lite with any of the horserace games, you will see they look incredibly similar, and

could easily be mistaken for an Atlantic City depending upon the viewing angle:

~ That shot is looking down into the main cabinet under the missing playfield ~

~ Where the heck were they going to mount an auto-mission coinbox – laugh ~

~ One of my favorite sayings in design is “form-follows-function” and here it was very true ~

…a bit more Bingo Trivia ~

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