Sinbad

Sinbad is Bell Coin Matics’s solid-state, four-player pinball, built in Bologna in 1979 as a joint production with the fellow Bolognese firm Europlay. It reworks Gottlieb’s 1978 Sinbad^[1], sharing that game’s Fantasy cast of the legendary Arabian sailor — a subject Gottlieb had drawn from Ray Harryhausen’s swashbuckling Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the 1977 film Columbia Pictures had in cinemas the very year it bought Gottlieb outright. That coincidence made Gottlieb’s machine the first pin whose film and factory answered to one corporate parent, the template every later Hollywood tie-in would follow.^[2]

For the two Bologna firms, though, the hit was less a licence to buy than a design to rebuild. Europlay specialised in Electromechanical remakes of the earliest Solid State tables, and its own one-player electromechanical Sinbad — carried in the catalog as Sinbad Adventures — ranked among the firm’s biggest sellers.^[1] Its partner had itself been founded only a year earlier, in 1978, and earned its living from conversion kits that reworked older Bally machines rather than from designing games of its own.^[3] Bologna’s coin-op trade was crowded enough that at its peak the city reportedly held more pinball factories than Chicago, the American industry’s own capital.^[4] Bell returned to Gottlieb’s design the following year, paring it back further into a 1980 kit titled The Hunter.^[5] Only in the mid-1980s did the company set rebadged kits aside for machines of its own, by then trading as Nuova Bell Games and building its own circuit boards.^[6]