Free Ball Return Lanes

A free ball return lane is a lane that delivers the ball to the shooter alley instead of to the drain, so the player plunges the same ball again; unlike a Free Ball Gates, it has no gate across it and is open whenever the ball finds it.^[1]

Gottlieb built the lane into a run of machines around 1970 and called it a mid-field ball back — Scuba (1970) is the example the term is usually explained by.^[2] The idea came back four decades later on the other side of the flipper: Stern machines from Star Trek (2013) to Rush (2022) run a return lane behind the flipper that carries the ball round to the shooter lane, and American Pinball uses the same arrangement.