Jaws

The Europlay Jaws is an electro-mechanical pinball machine from Italy built around a shark and scuba-diving theme, with artwork by Michele 'Mike' Martinelli. Rather than an original design, it is a converted electromechanical Gottlieb game fitted with an added digital display and sound card; its playfield layout appears to borrow from Bally's 1978 'Playboy,' and its backglass artwork is in part copied from Gottlieb's 1970 'Scuba' (artwork later reused again on AMI's 1976 'The Shark'). This game was itself later converted again into Bell Coin Matics' 1979 'White Shark.'

Gameplay features include two flippers, three pop bumpers, two slingshots, a 5-bank of drop targets, four standup targets, a kick-out hole, a spinning target, and an end-of-ball bonus - a fairly full-featured layout for a converted EM machine.

One curious detail noted by researchers is that the cabinet artwork shows flames, inconsistent with the shark and water theme; this may reflect an operator's reuse of a cabinet from an unrelated 1980 machine called 'Hell.' Taken together, Jaws is best understood as a patchwork conversion piece, illustrating how European operators recombined existing hardware and artwork rather than commissioning wholly new designs.