Hot-Rods

Hot-Rods is a vintage flipperless game from Bally Manufacturing Corporation with an auto racing theme, mentioned in the Coin Machine Journal in November 1949. Carrying model number 508, it comes from an era when manufacturers were still experimenting with a wide variety of coin-op amusement formats.

One of the most distinctive features of Hot-Rods is its use of colored wooden balls rather than the steel balls standard in pinball. The playfield is remarkably simple, with no electro-mechanical components except for nine rollovers at the very bottom. Play appears to have worked like a betting-style novelty: the player turns a knob on the front of the cabinet to select a car before inserting each coin (up to seven coins per game), then shoots five balls - reportedly all into play at the same time. Balls landing in a selected lane at the bottom of the playfield score replays shown on the backglass, from 3 replays for one ball up to 40 replays if all five balls land in the same selection.

As a rarely seen game, Hot-Rods offers a glimpse into the era just before flippers came to dominate the industry, when manufacturers like Bally were still experimenting with novel selection-and-payout style gameplay wrapped in popular themes like hot rod racing.