Star Ship

Star Ship is an extraordinarily rare electro-mechanical pinball machine from Bally Manufacturing Corporation - in fact, only a single engineering sample unit was ever built. Designed by Greg Kmiec in the late 1970s under the working title "Super Shooter," the game was reworked with a futuristic art theme and renamed Star Ship, but Bally ultimately assigned the Star Trek license (and its similar playfield) to another designer for the 1979 release of Star Trek. Rather than scrap the finished Star Ship design, Bally reused its whitewood and layout under a new theme, releasing it as 1979's Supersonic - making Supersonic the only Bally title to have carried two production names.

One of the standout features of Star Ship's design is its extensive array of targets and bumpers, which demands precision and skill from players. The machine boasts two flippers, three pop bumpers, two slingshots, a five-bank of drop targets, four standup targets, a kick-out hole, a spinning target, and 11 star rollover lanes - an ambitious and busy layout typical of Bally's late-1970s EM games.

The Star Ship's design and artwork evoke a sense of retro futurism, with a space-age backglass depicting a spaceship reminiscent of the one from the 1960s Star Trek TV series - the same image later reused on Bally's 1979 Star Trek. Because only one sample unit and its two backglasses were ever produced, Star Ship stands as one of the rarest and most historically interesting artifacts in Bally's pinball lineage.