Silver Sails

Silver Sails is a Bally bingo-style pinball machine designed by Don Hooker, produced between mid-1962 and mid-1963 -- making it a product of the early 1960s bingo era rather than the 1940s or 1950s. It shares its base design with Bally's 1962 'Golden Gate' but was released with a new backglass and a water sports theme.

Gameplay follows the classic bingo format: five balls for 10 cents, with 25 trap holes on the playfield along with a Magic Screen and "OK Feature" mechanism adding extra scoring possibilities. As a bingo machine, its play centers on landing balls in the right combinations of trap holes rather than on flipper skill.

Silver Sails holds a specific place in pinball's legal history: Bally advertised it as their last bingo game released before the effective date of the Eastland Bill (S-1658), federal legislation outlawing interstate transportation of gambling devices. Bally's subsequent release, 'Bounty' (1963), was the company's first game made after an amendment to that law was passed, underscoring how directly Silver Sails' timing was shaped by the regulatory pressures facing the bingo pinball industry in the early 1960s.