Cocktail cabinets are horizontal, table-height units with a flat glass top, designed so players look down onto the playfield from above while seated. The format takes its name from the cocktail-table arcade cabinets popularized by video games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man in the late 1970s, and it shares their social premise: a game built into a piece of furniture, suitable for a bar or lounge where players sit with drinks rather than standing at an upright machine.

Applying the cocktail format to pinball required solving the problem of a game designed around gravity on a tilted surface. Some cocktail pinball machines used a conventional tilted playfield viewed through an angled mirror or glass panel. Others placed the playfield flat and used mechanical or magnetic systems to propel the ball, fundamentally altering the physics of play. The results were mixed — the format worked well enough as a novelty, but the compromises required to fit pinball into a horizontal, seated-play cabinet inevitably changed the feel of the game.

Cocktail pinball machines were never produced in large numbers, and the format remains a curiosity rather than a mainstream cabinet type. The machines that exist are valued by collectors precisely for their rarity and their status as experiments in reimagining what a pinball machine could physically be.