In some cases they might see bad coin drop after putting the samples out

A former distributor employee told me this about Bally. Bally would ship sample games to distributors to place in large Arcades. The Arcades put out a sign about it being a new pin, and counted the coin drop. If the coin drop was poor they’d cancel production. The Arcades kept the pins for free whether they earned well or not.

I think Gottlieb used to use something they called gauged production. After the new machine was designed, but not yet in production, Gottlieb would send flyers out to all their distributors, who would then place orders for however many of a particular machine they thought they could sell. Gottlieb would total the orders from the distributors and then build that many machines. It was supposed to make for a more efficient operation, and cut down on surplus unsold machines.

Some of the lower production games were add-a-ball models.
There was obviously less demand for them.

back in Boston during the EM years playing pinball, the machines went to arcades and private club's mostly,you really couldn't buy a pinball machine like you could today. and again all the places where they went were run by the "wiseguy's" so you really didn't abuse the machines too much to break a back glass. and back then, people didn't put pinball machines in their homes. nobody ever thought they would become collector items, most parts produced where to keep the machine running ie coils,rubbers,drop targets.... back glasses and plastics not so much...they really didn't care about flaking glass,just put your quarters in the machine kid and leave me alone...lol

The same could be said of certain models or option packages of cars. Case in point: in 1969, Ford introduced the Mach 1 option package for the '69 Mustang. It came with more options and had a racier look than the GT did for a very similar, if not cheaper, price. In previous years, the GT would sell at a pretty high rate as they could be had in any body style(coupe, fastback, or convertible). For '69, the Mach 1 was only available in a Fastback. Due to the great deal the option package was, the Mach 1 sold over 72k units while the GT sold under 5k units(down about 75% from 1968). Nobody wanted the GT anymore, and by 1970, the GT was no longer available.

Again, nobody wanted the '69 GT when it was new. Nowadays, everybody is racing to find one as if there's some sort of built-in scarcity that automatically increases their value simply because there are so few of them. I think it's kinda like AAB versions of games. They're a different style of game that not everybody liked as much as the originals, plus the operators probably made less as game times most likely increased due to all the extra balls a decent player could earn.

There are all kinds of factors that influenced car sales, including why not many convertibles were sold, yet everyone wants one like a 1969-1970 olds 442 Hurst convertible which will run over $300k if numbers match. The reason they didn’t sell many convertibles? Security. A dope with a switchblade and everything but what’s locked in the glove compartment is toodaloo, and even that if they brought a crow bar. My Dad said convertibles are what “sunglass wearing saps and leather elbowed egg heads drive if they don’t mind wise guys stealing them blind” or something like that. Wasn’t a popular bullet point on the sales brochure I guess.

In speaking to Wayne Neyans personally he CT told me every game Gottlieb built was a sold game.

I was reading through that issue of Pinball Magazine #5 that has the big interview with Wayne Neyens. Found a couple of references to the gauged production idea:

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PM: Once the decision was made to use the roto-target, would parts for that unit be ordered per game, or like per 50,000 at a time since they were going to be used anyway?

WN: No, no. We only ordered parts per game. If we knew we were going to build 2,000 games, we would order parts for 2,000 games. Where would we put them? We didn't have room to stock material. We never ordered material ahead of time. We would order it and build it, order it and build it. Our stockroom held nothing but nuts, bolts, rivets, the basics. As far as ordering ahead goes, it would just fill up the room. (pg. 150)

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PM: The phrase "Gauged production, controlled distribution" appears for the first time on the flyer for Alice in Wonderland, from August 1948. What did that phrase mean?

WN: At the time, all manufacturers were shipping games like crazy. When they had a new game coming out, they would ship 50, 100, 200 games to each of their distributors. These poor distributors had to take them, and if they couldn't sell them, they started eating them. What that does to a distributor is he'll go broke. Dave (Gottlieb) then came up with the idea of Gauged Production and Controlled Distribution.

Dave was head of the Coin Machine Industry Association for many, many years. One time at a CMI banquet, he got up, gave a little speech, and coined the phrase "gauged production and controlled distribution". He thought it would be good for the industry to follow this outline. From then on, Dave followed this religiously. I don't know about the other companies, but from that time on, we never produced a game that he didn't have an order for. He controlled distribution so that if you were a distributor and had an area, you had an exclusive. No one else could get in there and sell a game.

So when he started a new game, Nate (Gottlieb - Dave's older brother), being in charge of selling, would call up each distributor and ask them how many games they wanted to buy, and they would place an order. If they wanted 50, that's what they got. If you wanted 30, you got 30. You just never overloaded them. Then Nate would add up all those orders and tell Dave we're going to build 500 games or 1,500 or whatever the number was going to be. And that's what we ordered parts for. As we got into building the game, Nate would call them again and ask them, "How are you doing? Do you want some more games? Or do you want to get rid of some games?" If they had too many games, he would trans-ship to somebody who needed games. This made the distributors wealthy. They became very good distributors, they had money, and it was a wonderful thing.

Other companies would often have games sitting on their floor that were not sold, and would call up their distributors and offer them a discount. Sometimes they'd even send out the games without an order. But Gottlieb never pressured anyone. We didn't have to. We never had a game left over that was unsold. We made exactly what was ordered. That's why sometimes you'll see production numbers with an odd number, like 865 games, or 1,515, or some such number. That's because that was how many orders we had. So that's how many games we made. We never pushed a game on to an operator after the late '40s. These odd production numbers have always confused and amazed the collectors of today. The collectors study and keep track of the serial numbers trying to figure out how many games are out there. The number of games made helps to influence the price of used games, as well as their popularity. (p. 82)

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That's a fantastic magazine to have if you're a fan of Gottlieb and Wayne Neyens, by the way. Alllll kinds of stuff in there!

Just looking at Gottlieb in 1975
It looks like operators just did not like single player Wedgeheads, only 2500 of each title, plus 800 add-a-ball
Two player games did not fare much better
But operators loved 4 player games and bought them in numbers

They also found out that very seldom were all four players played at the same time. Two more often, three not very much four hardly ever. The manufacturers made bank on selling those.

It makes sense. Who wants to stand around waiting for three other guys to play?

Anyone who works on EMs will tell you the third and fourth player reels generally have very little wear on them.

I am not sure if that happened in the EM era, but in the 90's, that was a problem.
They were trying to sell the WPC95 games, but operators were saying that the older WPC games were still bring in the money, why should they buy new games?

Seasonal summer boardwalk arcades made sales big for summer, I have heard, and the dumpsters were full come fall of really older titles, which got parted and trashed as winter storage space dictated what was kept for the next season, or got moved out and put on site elsewhere. Or so the tall carny tales tell of the trade back then. It’s also why there is so much EM pinball to be had in PA, NY, and NJ and surrounding areas. These things moved through the carny circuits and county fairs had tents full of EM’s, arcades, and rifle games, set up on muddy canvas floors and as level as an obstacle course if they had any floor at all. Been there, seen that with my own eyes. We still to this day refer to a poorly set up machine as being some “carny conspiracy” geared at removing quarters from unsuspecting kid’s pockets.

When he was young, my niece's husband had a friend who worked for Mondial in NJ. His friend always enjoyed it when his boss told him to go out back and bust up some old games. Their sad remains were chucked in a dumpster.

Hell has a place reserved for all those people.

Who knew?

What are the rarest EM's?
I know Double up had 55 made, Bali Hi was 80, I know Blue note and Gemini had like 300 of each so not as rare, TKO seems like they made 125 but none were sold in the US
I've seen and played all of these except TKO, but I have held a NOS TKO playfield, just never seen one set up.
So what's the rarest?
B

there was a formula that I've heard thrown around something like 10% loss per 10 years or some such thing? Maybe someone can chime in with that.
I've heard from many people that TKO is pretty "Meh"- Double up has rad art but the game play is also "Meh" I worked on Bali Hi but didn't really get to play it, but it belongs to a friend so I'm sure eventually.......
B

How many think Subway is overrated because of the gap? It’s like these people have never been FORCED to play a machine before, and what I mean is, the Bally Wizard machine was OOC, so if we wanted to play, the only choice left in the bowling alley was a 10 cent for 5 balls hurter gapped wedgehead called Subway. Did we play it? Yes. Did we like it? No. Do I own one now? You better fucking believe it.

"Subway" rocks! It takes getting used to figuring out how to avoid the big flipper gap, but once you master it, it's a great player. I love that quick 400 point play, going up and down the right or left lanes when they're lit.

There are some woodrail EMs which are extremely rare because of a combination of low production numbers and normal attrition. Gottlieb "Cue-T", and "Glamor" are quite scarce.

Only way to turn it over beside sheer number of extra balls. By statistics my average Subway score is 1500 so my average ball score is 300 points.. so 10,000 divided by 300 is… 33 balls?!? Yikes! Ok, maybe we go for 400 points at a time… yeah, let’s try that. lol

I've seen people asking big $ for Glamor, but Cue-T? they have 3 of them at the PPM, 2,800 produced seems like there should be a bunch of these around still but some titles definitely didn't survive the culls.
One of my favorites is Rockmakers, they made a few thousand of those but I think most went to the dump! Rarely ever see one in a collection or for sale, took me 5-6 years to track one down.
Who else (besides Mike Schiess-PPM) has a Bali Hi? I've never seen one come up for sale or in any collection pics, seems to be a really rare game.
B

I've often wondered about certain Em's where more than half of the production run was shipped overseas. I wonder if that was driven by pre sales and if so what made some of those titles popular overseas?

1964 Williams Stop N Go comes to mind.

Oops! Correct game name is "Miss Cue-T". It was thought that it was never produced, but it was.
Only two are documented to exist.
https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=3753

Your close, actually it was for every ten years you cut the production number in half. So 500 made would be 250 left after the first ten years, then 125 the following ten years and so on.

John

That may have been true for decades, but thankfully I think the rate of attrition has slowed greatly due to the growth of the pinball collecting hobby.

Yes, it can’t stay constant…. Look at repro numbers on BG and PF… they outperform the thumb rule. Some titles should be gone but repros sell out.

One just went up for sale on FBM, $7000

Got to play one a TPF in 2018? The last one before COVID. If I would have known this machine existed when I was a young lad, I would have sought it out until I found one to play. Ahead of its time doesn’t even come close to describing this, and we used to blow a dime doing 5 ball Gottlieb multiballs just for the thrill. That a machine could do it for every ball in play, if you were good enough, would have blown our young 8 year old minds.

A whole lot of the 4P pins went overseas, especially Germany and France, where for some reason they preferred or insisted on 4 player pins.

This is from that same Pinball Magazine Wayne Neyens issue. Regarding multi-player vs single-player games:

"At one point, Wayne decided to test the drawing power of the 4-player game and installed meters in a machine on location. This allowed him to determine how many times the game was played by one player, by two players, by three players, and by four players. Results showed that the overwhelming majority of games were played by one player, occasionally by two players, seldom by three players and almost never (less than 1%) by four players. Yet, because certain locales, particularly Texas and Germany demanded them, and were willing to pay the steep premium, 4-player games became an important part of the Gottlieb product mix." (p. 31)

I've played it. I think it's a pretty good game.

I have a couple of games that were under 1000 run to start with. One is 62 years old, the other 56. There just can't be very many of them left out there.

Of course there was Gottlieb Wizard, precursor to Gottleib Abra Cadabra, handful sent overseas...

And Bally Evel Knievel EM, 155 made (plus now two clones )

I’m lucky enough to have a TKO in my collection and I think it’s a real fun machine. Anytime I have guests over, particularly “non pinball” guests, I can see that TKO gets played the most. When I ask them their input on the machines and what one they like the most, the least, etc. TKO seems to be everyone’s favorite.

Did you install a 60hz motor in yours? Every one I have played had a 50hz motor. It runs faster and I just don't like the chatter those motors make when scoring.

I'd say this may be the rarest of the rare if it still exists.
https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=3766

Single player version of Flip Flop. 85 made.

https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/slap-stick

That games doesn’t make sense based off of what Wayne says about it having score reels and then the date on IPDB saying 1954?

No I haven’t modified the motor. It sounds just like other Gottlieb’s from that era