Speakeasy

The 1982 Bally Speakeasy is a fascinating addition to any pinball collection. Produced in August 1982 and designed by George Christian with art by Greg Freres, it captures an immersive American History theme that transports players back to the Prohibition era, complete with a roulette wheel built into the playfield.

Gameplay-wise, the Speakeasy boasts an array of challenging objectives, including successfully hitting a 5-bank of flyaway targets to complete playing card sequences. A unique twist on this classic mechanic is the "sacrifice" feature, which lets players press an extra button at the start of each ball to cancel out-of-sequence cards - at a cost of 25,000 points per canceled card. This added layer of strategy gives the game notable depth for its era, and the game can award both replays and extra balls during the same play.

The Speakeasy's playfield design features a roulette wheel, three pop bumpers, and two kick-out holes alongside the flyaway target bank. Reportedly, all playfields in this production run were made of resin (plastic) rather than wood, and the woman on the backglass is said to be wearing Etruscan or Egyptian revival jewelry popular in the 1920s. With 3,000 confirmed units produced, it was a modest but respectable run for a Bally title of the period - and far from the company's last solid-state game, since Bally (and later Bally Midway) continued producing pinball machines throughout the rest of the 1980s.