Upper Ball Return Gates

Upper ball return gates are Ball Return Gates set high on the playfield rather than down among the flippers, where they keep a ball that has climbed into the top arch from rolling back the way it came.

Up there the gate is about traffic rather than survival: the ball has a long way to fall before it is in danger, and what the gate settles is which of the routes down it takes. Bally fitted the arrangement across the second half of the 1960s, and Williams, Playmatic and Maresa used it in the same years. Its right-hand form is the Upper Right Ball Return Gates.