Rodeo

Meet Rodeo, a 1979 solid-state pinball machine from Sega Enterprises, Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan, built around a horses/rodeo/Western theme for up to four players. This particular example — the only 4-player 'Rodeo' known to survive — was found in France in 2020, with a coin-door tag showing serial number 5813, inspected in May 1979. It is a follow-up to Sega's original 1976 two-player 'Rodeo,' which used a different playfield layout.

The game's features include two flippers, two pop bumpers, four star rollovers, three stand-up targets, two rollover buttons, a spinning target, a kick-out hole, and a drop-down cabinet, along with a 'Your Number' match feature. There are no slingshots. A standout mechanic is the horse score, which advances through values up to 'special' each time the ball hits the Rodeo drop target — a target that, unlike typical drop targets, is controlled entirely by the CPU: it drops and later 'jumps up' automatically on its own roughly five-second cycle, rather than in response to being hit. The horse score also functions as an outhole bonus, affected by a center multiplier of x1 to x2.

Rodeo reflects Sega's activity in the pinball market during the 1970s; the company manufactured pinball machines from 1971 to 1979. As the only known 4-player example of this title, it stands as a distinctive and well-documented piece of Sega's pinball output from that period.