Detour Gates

A detour gate is a gate that takes the ball off the path it is running down and puts it on another one. Where a plain Ball Return Gates only enforces the direction of travel, a detour gate changes the destination, and the change is usually one the player has earned.

Its commonest use is at the bottom of the playfield, where a gate in an Outlanes catches a ball on its way out and hands it back to a flipper. Big Guns (1987, Williams) opens its right-hand one for the length of a jackpot mode, so that for those seconds the outlane returns the ball instead of losing it.^[1]

The device does not have to be a rescue. On Dogies (1968, Bally) the gates are the game: five of them govern a canyon in the upper left, three deciding whether the ball crosses the rollovers and leaves or stays trapped inside, a fourth closing the entrance behind it, and a fifth — armed only if the player has hit the right bumpers first — the one that saves the ball from draining at the end of it all.^[2][3] The fitting belongs to the Electromechanical years and the solid-state machines that grew out of them, running from Bally and Allied Leisure tables of the 1960s and 1970s to Mario Andretti (1995, Gottlieb).