Spelling-Bee

The 1956 Spelling-Bee by Bally Manufacturing Corporation is an electro-mechanical bingo pinball machine notable for its word-based theme, one of the earlier such themes to appear in the genre. It is essentially the same game as Bally's 1955 'Crosswords', released the year before, with a different color scheme on the backglass.

Gameplay on the Spelling-Bee revolves around 18 trap holes on the playfield: balls landing in lettered holes light the corresponding letters on the backglass to form words. This scoring mechanic and the machine's cabinet design were significant enough to be patented (U.S. Patent No. USD177,950), filed in November 1955 and granted in December 1958 to Charles G. Troeller and Donald E. Hooker, assignors to Raymond T. Moloney of Bally. The game was designed to be placed in locations that would not accept traditional bingo machines, since it has no multiple-coin capacity or variable odds.

While little is known about the machine's specific art design beyond its shared lineage with Crosswords, its electro-mechanical construction and word-forming gameplay make Spelling-Bee an interesting artifact of Bally's mid-1950s bingo game output.