Automat

The Automat is an unproduced pure mechanical pinball design from Bally Manufacturing Corporation's earliest years. A patent covering its game apparatus (DE 90,923) was filed in June 1933 and granted that October to R.T. Maloney, but the game itself was never put into production.

According to the Encyclopedia of Pinball, Automat was meant to follow Bally's February 1933 'Airway,' but its release was repeatedly delayed — first by an extended Airway production run, then by the payout game Rocket (which reused Automat's playfield design and totalizer), and again by Rocket's non-payout counterpart Blue Ribbon, which was essentially the same game as Automat. By the time 1934's New Improved Rocket arrived, Automat was considered outdated and was shelved for good.

Planned features included ten snap traps, a playfield-mounted automatic totalizer that tallied the player's score, and a "Mechanical Book-keeper" for operator audits — an ambitious combination of mechanical scoring aids for its time. No photographs of the actual game are known to survive, only period text promoting it. Bally later reused the name for an unrelated 1936 machine. As an unbuilt prototype-stage design, Automat is chiefly of interest to historians tracing Bally's early auto-racing-themed games and the lineage that led to Rocket and Blue Ribbon.