New York Defence

New York Defence, produced by Electronic Games Systems S.R.L. (E.G.S.) of Fano, Italy, made its debut in October 1981 at the ENADA show in Rome before appearing at the Forainexpo show in Paris that December. It stands out among Solid State Electronic (SS) pinball machines of its era for an unusual design choice: the backbox uses a video screen as its sole means of display, rather than traditional score reels or lamp-based displays.

While specific details about gameplay mechanics and rules are not documented, the use of a video screen for scoring and information display was a distinctive departure from the norm for pinball machines of the early 1980s, most of which still used mechanical or lamp-based backglass displays.

The machine's utilitarian design aesthetic deviates from the more ornate, thematic backglasses often associated with pinball machines of the time. Very little else is documented about New York Defence - it was previously listed under the two-word name "New York" and may still appear that way in other pinball resources - and no other surviving examples beyond the pictured unit(s) are currently known, making it a genuinely obscure artifact of early-1980s Italian pinball.