Gold Medal

Gold Medal, manufactured by Bally in May 1939, comes from the pre-flipper era of pinball and belongs to a very different tradition than the games most players know today. It is an electro-mechanical one-ball payout machine: the player received a single ball per play, and winning results paid out directly, placing it firmly in the gambling-adjacent category that formed an important part of Bally's business in the 1930s. A non-payout version of the same game was sold as Bally's 1939 'Gold Cup'.

The playfield is populated by seventeen passive bumpers, and with no flippers the outcome depended largely on the initial shot and chance. That simplicity was the point - one-ball payout games offered a quick, suspenseful play for a coin, and they were enormously popular on location in this period.

Little is documented about Gold Medal's original artwork or theme, but its age and its place in Bally's late-1930s payout lineup make it an interesting artifact of early pinball manufacturing and design, inviting closer examination and study.