Royal Belles

The Royal Belles, designed by Ed Krynski with artwork by George Molentin, was manufactured by J. H. Keeney and Company Incorporated in 1960. It appears to be a simple rename of Keeney's own 1960 game 'Eleven Belles,' and is a scarce find today — IPDB is aware of only a couple of surviving examples.

The game features a dancing-pageantry theme and is a one-ball game, in which the player gets a single ball per play. Key gameplay features include two flippers, one pop bumper, nine passive bumpers, and a kick-out hole, along with a 3-digit replay counter that can climb as high as 999 — a hallmark of games built for location payout arrangements common on one-ball machines of this type. Completing numbers 1 through 12 on the playfield awards 100 credits.

Little else is documented about the specifics of its design and history beyond its apparent link to Eleven Belles, but its rarity — with only a small handful of confirmed surviving machines — makes Royal Belles a notable curiosity for collectors and historians of Keeney's one-ball games.