Backbox Playfields

A backbox playfield is a second, upright playing surface standing in the backbox above a machine’s ordinary sloping one. The game has both, and the ball travels between them — up to the vertical surface for a spell of play there, then back down to the main one.

Genco built the idea mechanically in the early 1950s, as something to watch rather than to play. On Double Action (1951) a ball settling in a Double Action hole stays put and “activates a flipperless vertical playfield in the backbox where the next captive ball is mechanically lifted to the top and released to fall through pins”,^[1] scoring on its way down before the held ball is returned to play. Springtime followed three months later with the same arrangement, and carried its result further: “the scores from the flipperless vertical playfield carry-over to the next game”.^[2]

Made playable

The solid-state era handed the upper surface its own flippers. Williams prototyped it in 1987 on Wreck’n Ball, where “a vertical moving track lifts the ball in play to the vertical playfield in the backbox” and returns it below when it drains.^[3] That machine never shipped; retooled with a motocross theme it became Banzai Run (1988), which raises the ball the same way, by “a magnet on a moving vertical track”.^[4] The result is a game played on two surfaces at right angles to each other, and the best-known machine of this shape.