Ball-Quet
About This Machine
The Ball-Quet, manufactured by Carnival Supply Company of Kansas City, Missouri in February 1932, is a very early pure-mechanical tabletop counter game from the dawn of the coin-op amusement boom, predating the electromechanical and electronic pinball machines that followed.
What is known about the game comes from a period advertisement. Based on the picture in the ad, the Ball-Quet appears to consist of a playfield that the player tilts to roll a ball through a series of croquet hoops - a clever mechanical premise reflected in its croquet-inspired name. The same basic idea resurfaced decades later in electromechanical form with International Mutoscope's 1956 'Rock 'N Roll The Crazy Maze' and in solid-state form with Williams' 1983 'Rat Race'.
As a 1932 counter game documented mainly through advertising, the Ball-Quet is an intriguing footnote for collectors and historians alike, a reminder of how inventive the earliest coin-operated games could be and how their ideas echoed through later generations of machines.