Goin' Nuts

Goin' Nuts is one of the great what-ifs of the Gottlieb catalog: a solid-state widebody four-player game built by D. Gottlieb & Company in February 1983 that was never placed into production. Only 10 units are confirmed to exist, making it one of the rarest Gottlieb games of the System 80A era. It was designed by Shing Lam, and while the artwork has sometimes been attributed to Larry Day, Day himself has said he was not the artist, so the artist remains unidentified.

Its feature set is genuinely unusual. The game offers four flippers, seven pop bumpers, two slingshots, a five-target three-bank of drop targets, five standup targets, two rollunders, and a captive "messenger" ball. Most strikingly, every ball begins in three-ball multiball, and the playfield has no outlanes at all, an almost unheard-of combination that makes the game a nonstop, forgiving flurry of action.

Because it never reached production, Goin' Nuts is known mostly through its handful of surviving sample games, and it remains a fascinating case study in Gottlieb's early-1980s experimentation.