Gold Cup

The Gold Cup, manufactured by Bally in July 1939 as model 349, is a flipperless electro-mechanical game from the late pre-war era of pinball. It came at a time when Bally offered its designs in multiple configurations for different markets: this is the non-payout replay model, which Bally also sold as a console model restricted to one-ball play. The one-ball coin-payout version of the same game was sold as Bally's 1939 'Gold Medal,' and one period Billboard ad even shows the 'Gold Medal' name superimposed over a Gold Cup backglass.

Gameplay centers on the machine's 17 passive bumpers, with operators able to set the game for 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 balls per play. As with all games of this era, there were no flippers; skillful plunging and nudging determined how the balls interacted with that dense field of bumpers.

An archival footnote: the game's date was previously recorded as October 1939 but was corrected to July 5, 1939 based on Bally's own documentation, a reminder of how much careful research goes into documenting even the smaller titles of pinball's early decades.