Hot Shot

Hot Shot, manufactured by Midway (using the Bally trade name) in October 1994, is a basketball-themed redemption game rather than a traditional pinball machine, though it is built on Williams' full WPC (Williams Pinball Controller) boardset with a full-size dot-matrix display. Designed by Mark Coldebella, Chuck Bleich, and Brian Eddy, with software by Brian Eddy and sound/music by Jon Hey, it applied mid-1990s pinball electronics to an arcade basketball format.

Gameplay centers on a large button that operates a manual ball shooter, along with game-select and ball-serve buttons, letting a single player shoot mini-basketballs at a moving basket target. The game offers five different sub-games under the same basketball theme, though only one player can play at a time. An optional card dispenser could drop basketball or other gaming cards as a prize for reaching certain point totals.

Hot Shot's backbox artwork depicts WMS pinball designers among the crowd, a playful in-joke for the era. Cabinets were produced bearing both the Midway and Williams names. Combining familiar WPC pinball hardware with redemption-style basketball play, Hot Shot offers an interesting crossover between pinball technology and arcade redemption gaming from the mid-1990s.