Old color photographs often turn a more red hue with age.

Red paint pigments often turn white/clear with age. (So a purple would lose its red component and turn blue)

Flyers were never meant to be Pantone-level color references so they're often a bit off. And when people scan them they sometimes whack the colors too.

Note that that exact promo photo was used to make that flyer, so it's not the (very common) case of the flyer game being different than later games.

Which is all to say that the plastics in that playfield photo, and the color under the leg on the cabinet, are probably about the best you're going to do for a reference on the "correct" purple color at this point.

I'm the one who scanned that photo for the IPDB, but I was doing many hundreds of photos and didn't spend too long on any one of them restoring the colors perfectly. I just had another run at that one, trying to balance out the red channel better and this is what I came up with. It's subtle, but this is probably closer to the truth (with the usual caveats, including the variations between monitors, how this website will inevitably slightly alter the color space when I upload the image, etc.)

williams_miss_o_pr_photo_01_redfix (resized).jpg

I think many AAB versions of Williams games have higher scoring, including often an extra digit of score reels. Maybe it's just psychology? If you can't win games, at least you can get a higher score? (And you'd tend to, as there would on average be more balls per game, instead of more games, to maintain about the same average playtime per amount of money inserted.)

Yes, they were totally not careful at all with "photo shoot games" - my 600DPI scans of 8x10 photos show details that would never be seen on a halftone reproduction on a flyer. Instruction cards are wrong, bumper cap colors are wrong, all kinds of things are wrong.

My favorite find was a photo before it had been retouched to show just the game, kind of a behind the scenes look at how they took the photos:

https://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=2485&picno=63125&zoom=1

SO MANY interesting things going on there!

No amount of searching through Williams documentation has provided me the answer to that question. Definitely a "time tunnel" type device, but wrong manufacturer! The location is the prototype build-up lab at 3401 N. California Ave, so it could be absolutely anything. We can't see enough of the playfield sitting on the pin jack, to provide a platform for the rear legs, for us to know what it might be. And on and on.

Note my theory holds true here, of 10* the scoring on the AAB version (see all the painted scores on the PF), and an extra digit of score reels to handle it.