The Time of Your Life

The Time of Your Life is an extraordinarily rare electro-mechanical pinball machine, manufactured by Bally in August 1948, with only six units confirmed to have ever been built. It wasn't sold through ordinary distribution channels: it was created as part of an industry cancer-fundraising project and placed in movie theater lobbies showing the 1948 James Cagney film of the same name (itself based on William Saroyan's 1939 play), functioning as much as a promotional novelty as a coin-operated game.

True to that novelty purpose, it's a flipperless widebody game of exaggerated proportions: 36 bumpers cover the playfield, and the wooden legs are so tall that even adult players reportedly had to stand on boxes to reach the playfield. The backglass matches the oversized theme, displaying bulb scoring up to ten million points alongside a 'One Billion' light — a center playfield bumper scores one billion when lit, suggesting a truly enormous score was, at least nominally, within reach.

With its music-and-dancing theme tying back to the film's story and its purpose-built role as a charitable promotional piece rather than a mass-produced game, The Time of Your Life stands as one of the rarest and most unusual machines in Bally's catalog, prized today less for its gameplay than for its singular place in pinball history.