Apero Ball

Apero Ball (also rendered L'Apéro-Ball) is an electro-mechanical, flipperless single-player machine made by Comet of Dijon, France, dating from around the 1950s. It's a striking piece of French café-culture pinball history: the backglass depicts a dark-haired woman in shorts, seated at a bar with a drink raised and a wide-brimmed straw hat over her arm, with colorful liquor bottles lined up behind a mirrored bar wall.

Rather than flippers, the game uses a handle on the front of the cabinet to move the player's goalie back and forth, blocking the ball from draining through one of two outholes at the top of a playfield recessed at least 9 inches into the cabinet. Five pop bumpers and bulb scoring round out the gameplay, which IPDB notes plays similarly to Marchant's 1949 'Shooting' (also handle-operated), though the two games' playfield layouts differ.

Comet's original sales flyer pitched the machine directly at bar owners as an affordable, low-maintenance alternative to older "dead games," touting it as robust, compact, and silent. That marketing angle, paired with its distinctive aperitif-bar theme, makes Apero Ball a memorable example of mid-century French café pinball.