Fun Ball

Fun Ball, released by Chicago's Midway Manufacturing Company in December 1966, is an electro-mechanical bat game — a pitch-and-bat baseball machine in which the player swings a bat via a button to hit pitched balls, rather than a conventional flipper pinball game. Bat games were a popular arcade staple of the era, and Fun Ball is Midway's 1966 entry in the genre.

Midway offered the game in three models: Regular, Replay, and Extended Play, letting operators choose a configuration suited to local regulations and preferences. Surviving examples show some interesting variations — one documented machine has its replay window covered over and a start button added to the cabinet front, which may reflect either an operator modification or one of the non-replay factory models; the historical record on this point remains incomplete.

As a single-player baseball game from Midway's pre-video era, Fun Ball is a charming relic of mid-century arcade design, offering collectors a glimpse of the company's coin-op roots before it became famous for video games.