Roach Racers

Roach Racers is an extremely rare novelty and redemption pinball machine released by Sega Pinball in February 1997 -- IPDB records confirm that only a single unit was ever produced. It is essentially the same game as Sega's Derby Daze, released the same year, but swaps that game's horse-racing theme for an irreverent, insect-themed spin built around inside jokes about Sega employees.

The playfield features plastic roaches with color-coded racing stripes mounted on springs above corresponding playfield targets, including one named "Hairy Gary" after Sega's Gary Stern, complete with a tuft of white cotton for hair; other roaches were named after additional Sega staff members. Players use two flippers and nine pop bumpers to work the roaches around the track, with a 192x64 dot matrix display mounted beneath the playfield window showing the race in progress, all housed in a console-style cabinet. The game also reuses the extra-long flippers first introduced on Data East's 1990 King Kong.

Given its production run of just one confirmed unit, Roach Racers is one of the rarest machines in the Sega Pinball catalog, valued today mainly as a curiosity and an inside joke immortalized in pinball form.