Nice! Any serial numbers stamped in the cabinet or at a sticker on the backside?

It seems to be in a very nice conditon. Is it still playing?

http://www.ipsnd.net/View.aspx?id=102

That's a Midway coin door.
.................David Marston

Im going with operator hack, albeit a nicely done one

That still doesn't answer where the big cabinet start start button went, though

Should be easy enough to pop the coin door open and see if the other two flippers were ever mounted.

But that start button is fascinating..... I can't even see any evidence it was ever on the cabinet. Did Atari have full-on coin doors for anything prior to Atarians? All the 1976 and prior arcade games I'm looking at just had the smaller coin mech mounting plates.

or the 2 missing flippers. Where the flippers should be, it has different ball wire guides, and plastics that seem to match the artwork. I suppose its possible that some operator, removed 2 flippers, made custom wire guides and plastics AND while he was at it, nicely and cleaned patched the start button hole and proceeded to then match the paint/art perfectly, but that seems like a stretch.

I could believe that being the first atari pin, and possibly a prototype, they used a midway coin door because it was available. The actual production coin doors weren't ready yet, but they needed a working prototype. Makes sense to me at least.

I am not an expert by any means, especially when it comes to atari pinball, but I'm gonna have to go with Occam's Razor on this one and bet it is a prototype of some sort. You'll definitely want to verify with somebody who would know though. I wonder if Mark or Steve Ritchie might have some answers.

Definitely document as much as you can and be sure to share with IPDB

Actually, Steve probably wouldn't be able to answer this one, he wasn't at Atari yet at that point.

-Hans

You think she might be able to open the playfield up? I'd love a peek at the boardset. Not that I'm an Atari guy, but I know someone who is. Plus I love seeing "proto games" with their various pre-release boardset hacks and as weird as Atari's normal boards were, I can't imagine what might be under there.

Also, would the flippers be standard mechs from other manufacturers - another pre-prod proto tell if Atari didn't have their weird rotary setup sourced by then...

With no PF lights even though the displays are on, it seems the game isn't working properly so it might be worth a peek anyway.

Back in the day when I was operating PINBALL PETES in Michigan we bought an Atarians. Still have it stored in THE BIG HIT SHED.

It also had the same bottom and had a Midway coin door FROM THE FACTORY.

Tim, even though your game is stored, is the playfield in view to confirm how many flippers it has? Or do you recall from memory?

I'm also curious if her game has a sticker on it, like this:

http://www.ipsnd.net/details.aspx?id=39714

Just FYI for the owner, that sticker is normally on the back of the cabinet body.

The serial is also sometimes hand written on the MPU. But if the board was swapped out at some point, the serial wouldn't match the game.