Sea Raider

The Sea Raider is an electro-mechanical conversion kit released by Victory Games in January 1945, based on Genco's 1941 game 'Captain Kidd.' Like many wartime and post-war conversion kits, it let operators refresh an existing cabinet rather than requiring an entirely new machine — the earliest known ad for the kit ran in Billboard in January 1945, with the last appearing in October 1946, by which point Victory Games had raised prices across their kit line from $9.50 to $12.50.

Gameplay on the Sea Raider centers on 16 passive bumpers spread across the playfield. As a Flipperless game, there are no motorized paddles — the player relies entirely on plunger skill and the layout of bumpers to rack up points, in keeping with pre-flipper pinball design.

The Sea Raider carries a military-nautical-naval theme, fitting for a game released during the final stretch of World War II. Little else is documented about its designer or artwork, but as one of Victory Games' wartime conversion kits, it remains an interesting artifact of the era's practical, budget-minded approach to keeping pinball routes running.