Joker's Wild

The Joker, manufactured by Venture Line, Inc. of Tempe, Arizona in 1978, is a rare and unusual machine: a four-player solid-state cocktail table pinball. Rather than a standard upright cabinet, it was housed in a Formica table advertised as 38 inches long, 28 inches wide, and 26 inches high, designed to sit in lounges and bars where a full-size pinball machine would not fit.

Despite its compact format, the Joker offers real pinball gameplay: two flippers, two pop bumpers, a slingshot, five standup targets, a spinning target, and a distinctive right-side triple inlane arrangement, all on a polyurethane-finished playfield. Operators could set 3 or 5 ball play and choose between electromechanical chimes or electronic sound.

The Joker has an interesting backstory: its playfield is the same as that of Mirco Games' 1978 'Lucky Draw'. According to a long-time Phoenix operator, the owner bought Lucky Draw playfields and overlaid a new name onto them, estimating that only about 25 playfields were renamed. That tiny run, combined with the novelty of its cocktail-table format, makes the Joker a genuinely obscure curiosity from the late-1970s solid-state era.