Bally Entry

Bally Entry, manufactured by Bally Manufacturing Corporation in February 1947, is an example of the postwar one-ball horserace payout machine - a genre Bally had been refining since the mid-1930s. It is the coin-payout version of Bally's 1947 'Special Entry', and company documentation indicates it was released to production on December 23, 1946. Cash Box announced the game as having been exhibited at the Coin Machine Show in Chicago in early February 1947.

Gameplay follows the one-ball formula: for 5 cents, the player shoots a single ball at a playfield containing 28 trap holes, hoping for a winning result. A 'Mystic Flash' button on the lockdown bar adds an element of excitement, and the game accepts a 4-coin multiple, letting players stake additional coins on a single play.

While the designer's identity is not recorded and production figures are unknown, Bally Entry stands as a representative piece of the horserace payout era, a lucrative branch of Bally's business in the years before flipper games came to define pinball.