- credit
- Raymond T. Moloney — Design
- ipdb.corporate_entity_name
- Bally Manufacturing Corporation
- ipdb_id
- 159
- ipdb.image_urls
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- ipdb.manufacturer_trade_name
- Bally
- ipdb.notable_features
- 5 or 7 balls for 1 cent, or 10 balls for 5 cents. This is a Square Machine, advertised as 24 1/2 inches square, and 8 1/4 inches high and with a solid walnut frame. One manufacturer ad included in the price a choice of a metal stand or wooden legs, for a total height of 36 1/4 inches. One of the games pictured here measured 23 1/2 inches square and 9 inches high. Both the wooden legs and metal stand attach to the cabinet with screws.
- ipdb.notes
- The playfield on this game is saucer-shaped and the shutter panel that keeps the trapped balls from falling through (aka baffle board) is also saucer-shaped but with its holes slightly offset. When the player pushes the coin chute to deposit a new coin, this curved shutter does not move back and forth like those on games with flat playfields, but instead slightly rotates on a central axis, aligning its holes with the playfield holes so that the trapped balls drop down towards the ball-lift.
In an interview published in 1982 in The Pinball Collectors' Quarterly, Bally Vice President Herb Jones explained they never could get the mechanics right on the rotating shutter panel, making the alignment of upper and lower holes erratic. Balls would get stuck and not fall through. As a result, he said, almost the entire run of this game was returned to the factory for refund or credit. Thousands of these games were scrapped by Bally, and their cabinets were salvaged to make Bally's 1933 'Mike & Ike'.
Of the cabinet examples pictured here, four show ball lifts, all different from each other. The cabinet photos attributed to Higgins show no external ball lift knob, as the lift is built into the ball shooter, where pulling back the shooter lifts the ball up to playing level. The cabinet photos attributed to Lankar show a round wooden knob on its right side, and the playfield sticker advises the player to turn this knob to 'release' balls. We are not certain if this knob releases balls to the ball shooter, or if it is used at the very start of play to drop all balls through the playfield holes as a solution to any problems encountered when the coin slide did it. The cabinet photos attributed to Ricci show a metal lever on the front, below the shooter knob, to lift the balls up. This third game also had extensive reconstruction inside, replacing metal with wood and vice versa, clearly not by the factory, so its ball lift style may not be original either. The cabinet photos attributed to Dodel show a metal ball lift knob on the side.
A Billboard article dated July 30, 1932 mentions a report from Bally President Ray Maloney that Ballyround had been "greatly improved" but does not elaborate. We know games with the combined lift-and-shooter were advertised in May of 1932. We would think the great improvement was with the troublesome baffle board. The fourth cabinet shown here appears to have all original internal construction. We have no pictures of the inside of the first two cabinet styles to evaluate further.
According to the Encyclopedia of Pinball Vol 1, Bally wanted to name this game 'Scram' until they discovered another game was being marketed under that name, Hutchison Engineering Company's 1932 'Scram!'.
- month
- 4
- player_count
- 1
- technology_generation
- pure-mechanical
- year
- 1932