Hi Boy

The Hi Boy, an electro-mechanical pinball machine designed by Wayne Neyens for D. Gottlieb & Company in November 1954 (model #96), is an especially rare and intriguing find: only one unit is confirmed to have ever been built. Unusually for its era, Hi Boy was a six-player machine — a complex undertaking that designer Wayne Neyens later recalled required an elaborate circuit, calling it "a beast" to design, with standard score reels and flippers.

No photographs of Hi Boy are known to survive, and Neyens himself had only a hazy recollection of the game decades later, unsure whether the single completed unit was ever even shipped. As a result, details of its specific playfield layout, artwork, or theme remain unknown.

Hi Boy stands out in Gottlieb's catalog chiefly for its ambitious six-player design, a rarity among electro-mechanical machines of the 1950s, and as a piece of pinball history it remains largely a mystery, known mainly through Neyens' own recollections rather than surviving hardware or documentation.