Tour De France

Tour De France is a hybrid solid-state and electro-mechanical pinball machine designed by Jon Norris in 1984, built as a two-player prototype that was never put into full production. According to Norris, only fifteen promotional flyers were ever printed for the game, and he gave them all away.

The design combined Stern 'Stars'-based solid-state circuitry with Gottlieb electro-mechanical step units for the special light, and featured four flippers, two pop bumpers, and a spinning target, along with a bagatelle unit built into the backglass. Its most memorable touch was a boom box with an endless cassette tape, wired to the flipper-enable relay, that played Kraftwerk's song "Tour de France" as background music whenever the flippers were active — years before Williams popularized in-game music on titles like High Speed and Hollywood Heat.

As a design that never reached production, Tour De France survives mainly through Norris's own account and a handful of promotional flyers, making it one of the more obscure prototypes in pinball history rather than a machine that ever circulated in arcades.