Dual Outlanes

Dual outlanes are two Outlanes side by side on each flank of the lower playfield, so a ball leaving the flipper area has an adjacent pair of channels to be lost down rather than a single one.^[1]

The layout belongs to the years before the inlane. The flipper return lane — the channel that feeds a ball back to the flipper instead of past it — arrived in 1965,^[2] and until then everything outside the flippers was drain, which designers divided into a pair of scoring lanes rather than leaving as one. Gottlieb was much the heaviest user, from Harvest Moon (1948) through Sunset (1962), and Williams built the same layout into its 1964 Zig Zag / Wing Ding pair.^[1] Afterwards the doubling moved inward: machines that want two lanes to a side now double the return lane instead, as Dual Inlanes.