There was only one reason for the alternate Kiss backglass - it had a representation of the nazi SS logo on it (KIZZ)

There is a big wide world OUTSIDE the USA in case you didn't know! A lot more going on that some Americans know or understand. Perhaps that's why more than half of all pinball production was shipped OUTSIDE the USA. Easy to see exactly what the problem is when you watch this with Jay Leno as host:

I think France and Germany are/were the biggest pinball countries in Europe.

To the best of my knowledge pinball was exported to Australia in the 50's, possibly earlier. The father of one of our parts distributors and professional game restorers here was very active importing games. I'm sure someone will chime in with exact information.

Spot on.
France has a rich history of pinball culture.
Look into “Bagatelle”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagatelle
If you look at the pinmap of France there’s still a ton of WPC games on location there.
I go to Paris a few times a year and you can always find places to play.

Also post war Europe in places like France and Germany had a lot of exposure to American culture with troops being stationed there after the war.
When machines were making the transition from EM to solid state some were produced in both forms. The French were resistant to the newer technology and still wanted EM games.

There’s some variants that were specifically for the European market.
A good example is the alternate KISS back glass where the they replaced the lightning bolt SS with regular SS so that it did not resemble letters the Nazi Schutzstaffel, which were banned in Germany after the war.

A602F1E0-1A56-427A-A115-259D3A135372 (resized).jpeg

A8D55B1A-6804-4DA6-88A7-6263F7103C06 (resized).jpeg

Somewhere around the house I have my grandfather’s bagatelle, which is dated 1909.
Not one of the exports that the OP refers to of course, but I’ll wager pinball has been thriving in Australia since the 1940s with so many American troops stationed here during the war

Watch 1960s French films, especially Godard, and there is pinball absolutely everywhere.

you can work it out for yourself, DMD era games, what languages can you set them to?

Brazil was also a big market, but they seem to have made their own machines

Brazil assembled "kits" mostly, sent to them under an agreement with most of the manufacturers as there was, and still is, a very high import tax on pinball machines into Brazil.

If they are "Made in Brazil", even if "Made" just means 'assembled', they don't pay this tax.

https://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?mfgid=367&sortby=name&searchtype=advanced

Williams made kits for the Spanish market
https://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?searchtype=advanced&mfgid=83

Stern (classic) made kits for the Australian market
https://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?searchtype=advanced&mfgid=681

I know my Gottlieb Mustang EM was not made in the USA
I think it was built in Italy

Boy is that stupid considering the band is Jewish.

They had no choice, since the swastika and Sig-rune (lightning bolt S) symbols are banned by the law in Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

Years ago I got in on a container of games coming back from Italy, so there must have been a market there at one time. I bought a Tee’d Off and think all I needed to do was change a jumper on the power line.

Was this for US manufacturer games like Bally/Williams/Data East? It’s not the case for Taito games.

I send a lot of repro ramps to France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway and Australia. Not so much to other places. I am surprised that I have never sent one to any part of Asia.

Wow, sad state of our education system! I'm sure its worse now with schools being shutdown for the past year.

Its still stupid.

The pinmap paints some pretty interesting pictures as far as machine locations and popularity within countries and regions.
I think Germany is a particularly interesting one because it wasn’t that long ago that it was divided into two countries by the Iron Curtain (East and West Germany). Even today there are far more collectors and locations in what was West Germany than there are in what was East Germany.
The exceptions being major cities like Berlin and Dresden where pinball has emerged since the wall came down.

I was in the Czech Republic a few years ago and got to play at this place.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/czech-pinball-community-cz-en-language
I buy and sell coins for a living so I have this funny habit of always looking at coin doors to see what currency the coin eject buttons are denominated in.
This place gathered up there machines from various places since pinball wasn’t really a thing in Czechoslovakia before communism fell.
They had machines denominated in French Francs, German Deutschmarks, English Pence etc.

You can basically draw a line across the entirety of Europe up until the late 80s and see where pinball was exported to up until that point. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe pinball gradually began to trickle into these other places. Some it still really has not taken off all that much.

Mexico and South America are a mystery to me.
If you look at the map there are very few locations or collectors in Mexico outside of one major club in Mexico City. I’m not sure why this is, but it seems that pinball is just not all that popular there.

In South America, Brazil seems to have the most.
I have a friend who grew up in Rio who tells me they had a lot of arcades there when he was a kid and they played a lot of pinball and arcade games growing up. I have another friend who grew up in Puerto Rico and he said that they were getting pretty much every new machine that came out back in the 80s. Puerto Rico is one that makes a lot of sense to me since it’s an American possession.

I don’t know much about the Asian market, but if you look on the map it’s pretty sparse. Japan has a few collectors and locations, which makes sense since gaming is pretty heavily embedded culturally.
I’m actually surprised that there are not more machines located in the Philippines considering the long history of US involvement there and the large military presence there.

23E1EEA1-FD80-4D02-B178-55BB8D986B73 (resized).jpeg

5AE131FD-E16F-4215-B14B-AE8696B10891 (resized).png

E8A81AA0-46EF-48E8-A5AC-81B29993DA04 (resized).jpeg

8761CD1F-44A4-49F7-A69F-9CA7E9D1CC04 (resized).jpeg

nice groupings

Haha, I know there’s more to Australia than Koalas, Crocodile Dundee and James Bond.

Italy imported a lot of Gottlieb pins in the 60s. I have a sample English Hyde Park that was tested in the US market before they made 900+ units in Italian to export to Italy.

Spain and Portugal had several pinball manufacturers in the 70s and 80s, so I’m not sure how many US pins were exported to these markets in the 70s and 80s.

Italy had a lot of machines. They even got their own titles

8A0B6A2B-1544-4023-B6C4-A114AD7C4EBC (resized).jpeg

I would have guessed more in Spain since I own 2 Spanish machines. Perhaps they're not on Pinside as much and stick to Spanish speaking forums?

You beat me to it. And apparently “flipper” was a naughty word over there. Had to be taken off the machines