Miss-O

Miss-O, designed by Norm Clark with art by Christian Marche, was manufactured by Williams Electronics in February 1969. This single-player electro-mechanical machine carries a billiards theme, with two flippers, four pop bumpers, four passive bumpers, two slingshots, five standup targets, and a horseshoe lane.

What sets Miss-O apart is its unusual extra ball mechanic: lighting the A-B-C-D targets lights the correspondingly lettered bumpers at the top of the playfield, and lighting all four lights the horseshoe inserts. Rolling over the horseshoe lane at that point quietly awards an extra ball — with no knocker sound and no playfield or backglass indicator that it happened, so an inattentive player could easily miss the award entirely. This feature cannot be disabled, and it resets each time the ball drains.

Miss-O was originally going to be called "Miss Q," a pun on the billiards term "mis-cue," but Williams discovered the French translation was sexually derogatory and changed the name, likely just before production began. Its add-a-ball counterpart is Williams' 1968 title Cue-T, and its playfield invites comparison to Williams' 1966 8 Ball.