Disco Fever

Disco Fever, designed by Tony Kraemer with artwork by Christian Marche, was manufactured by Williams Electronics in 1978 during the company's earliest solid-state era - it was only the fourth solid-state game Williams produced, and just the second to feature electronic sound (by Randy Pfeiffer, who also wrote the software). Riding the disco craze of the late 1970s, roughly 6,006 units were built on the Williams System 3 platform.

The gameplay experience is characterized by a dynamic combination of targets, flippers, and slingshots. The game's most distinctive physical feature is its curved "banana" flippers, which require different timing than conventional flippers to control the ball's trajectory - Williams' 1979 'Time Warp' is the only other production game to use them. Four standup targets, a 3-bank and a 2-bank of drop targets, a horseshoe lane, and a rollunder round out the playfield.

Disco Fever also carries some fascinating history. According to Tom Cahill, former Williams service manager, it was the first game Williams engineered to have speech: a talking prototype was shown at the Chicago AMOA show, though production games shipped without it. Williams production logs also reveal that the game began life as a banana-flippered title called 'Super Jai Alai' before being re-themed to disco prior to production. These quirks make Disco Fever a genuinely interesting artifact of Williams' transition into the solid-state age.