Gay Cruise

The Gay Cruise pinball machine, designed by Ted Zale for Bally Manufacturing Corporation, is a genuine rarity: only 60 units are confirmed to have been produced. It is a single-player, flipperless add-a-ball game whose backglass artwork is identical to Bally's 1966 replay game 'Fun Cruise', except that there is no replay window or replay mechanism behind it, and the playfield is reportedly identical to 'Fun Cruise' as well - making Gay Cruise essentially the add-a-ball counterpart of that game.

An interesting production detail: the ones-digit of the score is a silkscreened '0'. Dummy score reel segments were only adopted later, starting with Bally's 1970 'King Rex'. The theme, centered around happiness, recreation, ships, and travel, evokes a lighthearted holiday spirit typical of Bally's cruise-themed art of the era.

Because so few were made, surviving examples are exceptionally elusive - IPDB has even asked anyone who has seen one to get in touch so it can be photographed. That scarcity makes Gay Cruise one of the more mysterious entries in Bally's electro-mechanical catalog.