Lime Light

Lime Light, manufactured by Bally in May 1940, is a single-player, flipperless electro-mechanical (EM) pinball machine, model number 388. Players received 5 balls for 5 cents and aimed to rack up points using an unusually dense layout of 17 spring bumpers spread across the playfield.

A notable design touch is its replay counter, which is projected directly onto the backglass rather than displayed with a simple mechanical wheel — a nice bit of showmanship for a game from this era.

As a flipperless, bumper-heavy machine from Bally's catalog, Lime Light captures pinball's design language before the flipper's introduction in the late 1940s, when scoring depended entirely on skillful ball plunging and the layout of passive scoring elements like bumpers rather than player-controlled flippers.