Gold Cup

The Gold Cup, manufactured by Bally in March 1948, belongs to a distinct and colorful branch of pinball history: the one-ball horserace game. As horse racing captivated post-war audiences, Bally built a lucrative business on games like this, where a single ball per play and a field of trap holes mimicked the odds-driven thrill of the track. The Gold Cup is the replay version of this design; its coin-payout twin was sold as Bally's 1948 'Trophy.'

The playfield features four passive bumpers and no fewer than 31 trap holes, along with a Skill Lane option offered for jurisdictions that required five-ball play. With so much of the outcome riding on where that single ball settled, these games blended skillful plunging and nudging with a healthy dose of chance, which is exactly what made them popular and, in many places, controversial.

The backglass art is credited to Lester Hilbrich (1911-1999), who worked for Advertising Posters, Sullivan-Nolan Advertising, and Lions/Bally over his career. As an example of Bally's dominant late-1940s horserace line, the Gold Cup offers a window into a side of pinball history that thrived alongside, and quite apart from, the new flipper games of the same era.