Broadway

Broadway, Bally Model 535, is a rare and genuinely mysterious bingo machine from 1951. Together with Bright Lights, it was one of Bally's first two bingo machines after a gap of many years since the company's very first one, 1937's Line-Up. The game offered five balls for five cents, a playfield of 25 trap holes, a mirrored backglass, and a knocker (which Bally called a "sounder").

What makes this Broadway remarkable is its construction: surviving evidence shows that Bally reused its six-card Bright Lights game from April 1951 to create this one-card game, mounting a light board for a single large bingo card directly over the earlier game's six smaller cards and disabling several stepper units in the backbox. The underside of the playfield of the known example is even tagged 'Bright Lights', and the playfield and cabinet art are the same. The schematic (part number W-348c, issue date 1951) shows it as a replay game, yet Bally's internal documentation lists Model 535 as a "5-ball novelty" machine.

In the one example known to have been found, the backbox unit that searches for winning score combinations was physically removed, meaning no replays could ever be awarded and the knocker never operates, possibly so operators could demonstrate to local authorities that the game could not pay out. Reportedly, several of these games operated in the Syracuse, New York area, where replays were illegal. This listing previously carried the incorrect name '42nd and Broadway', and Bally later made a different bingo game with the same Broadway name in 1955. Production numbers are unknown, making Model 535 a fascinating footnote in the history of Bally's bingo line.