Bounce-Back Outlanes

Bounce-back outlanes are Outlanes built so that a ball running down one can be shoved back into play by nudging the cabinet, the player’s shoulder doing what a solenoid does in a Kickback.^[1]

The save costs the maker nothing but the geometry, and it puts the rescue entirely in the player’s hands — badly timed, the same shove tilts the machine. Bally fitted the layout to a run of games in the second half of the 1970s, and Sega, Bell Games and NSM used it into the 1980s. The later Flex-Save Lanes make the same trick deliberate, giving the nudge a hinged wall to work against instead of a fixed one.