Big Prize

Big Prize, from Western Products, Incorporated in May 1940, is an electro-mechanical machine from a company whose entire run in the industry lasted only from 1938 to 1941. It belongs to the one-ball payout genre: gambling-style games in which a single ball determined the outcome and winnings were paid directly to the player.

Its notable documented feature is that it was a six-coin machine, allowing players to insert multiple coins, a common arrangement on payout games of the era where extra coins increased the wager. Beyond that, little is recorded about its playfield layout, artwork, or theme.

Despite the thin documentation, Big Prize is an interesting artifact of its moment: a late-Depression payout game from a short-lived manufacturer, produced in the final years before wartime restrictions and anti-gambling legislation reshaped the coin machine industry.