Flying Saucer

Flying Saucer is an electro-mechanical shooting gallery game manufactured by Midway in October 1967 — not a flipper pinball machine, but a gun game built around a space-themed shooting gallery format. Its flying-saucer and outer-space imagery tapped into the mid-1960s fascination with science fiction and the ongoing space race.

Pricing was set at 10 cents for one play or 25 cents for three plays, a typical structure for arcade shooting games of the period. As a gun game rather than a traditional pinball, Flying Saucer relied on targets rather than flippers, ramps, or a ball-return playfield.

The game was announced to the trade in The Cash Box on October 14, 1967. Little further documentation survives about its design credits, but its extraterrestrial theme and shooting-gallery format make it a distinctive piece of 1960s coin-operated amusement history.