Evel Knievel

The Evel Knievel pinball machine, designed by Gary Gayton with artwork by Paul Faris, was released by Bally Manufacturing Corporation in January 1977. A licensed celebrity-themed game, it pays homage to the daredevil stuntman Evel Knievel, famous for his death-defying motorcycle jumps, and continues the licensed-theme strategy Bally had been pursuing successfully through the mid-1970s. This four-player game is the electro-mechanical version of the title; Bally also produced a far more common solid-state version, and this EM run was small, with only about 155 units built.

The playfield offers a full complement of classic Bally features: two flippers, three pop bumpers, two passive bumpers, two slingshots, six standup targets, two spinning targets, a five-bank of drop targets, and a kick-out hole, with an end-of-ball bonus rounding out the scoring. It is a feature-dense layout typical of Bally's late EM output.

With Paul Faris's artwork carrying the stuntman's high-octane image across the cabinet and backglass, and its tiny production run making surviving examples genuinely scarce, the EM Evel Knievel is an interesting collector's footnote to one of the better-known licensed themes of the late 1970s.