Laguna Beach

Laguna Beach, designed by Don Hooker for Bally Manufacturing Corporation, is not a conventional flipper pinball at all but a bingo machine, the flipperless, wager-style games at which Bally excelled for decades. With a confirmed production run of just 750 units, it is a comparatively scarce example of the breed, built around a playfield of 25 trap holes and two rollover buttons rather than flippers and bumpers.

As on other bingos, the object is to land balls in numbered holes to complete lines on the bingo-style card displayed in the backglass. Laguna Beach carries Bally's Magic Screen feature along with the OK Feature, and scoring three or more in orange pays at the green odds. If the appropriate features are purchased, the player can press buttons to rearrange the numbers on the backglass card at set points in the game: before shooting the fourth ball, before shooting the fifth ball, or even after the fifth ball, adding a genuine layer of strategy to each game.

Its beach and swimming theme is reflected in the backglass artwork. For collectors, Laguna Beach offers a window into a side of Bally's business, the electro-mechanical bingo machine, that ran parallel to, and often out-earned, the company's conventional pinball output.