Gun Game

Long before the light-gun arcade cabinet, the coin-operated gun game stood shoulder to shoulder with pinball on the arcade floor - and was very often built by the same hands. The shooting games gathered here came from Williams and Bally, pinball powerhouses that also armed players with mechanical rifles and pop-up targets.

They range from wartime-era novelties like Bally’s Torpedo (1942) to safari-themed shooting galleries such as Williams’s Safari (1954), where the goal was marksmanship rather than a well-timed flip. Catalogs list them beside pinball because they shared a factory, a route operator and a coin slot - but there is no playfield here, only a target downrange.