Bally : Bright Lights

Bright Lights

While United's ABC beat Bally to market by a few months, Bally's playfield layout became the standard for bingo's.

Game play doesn't get much simpler than this. Deposit one coin/credit per card, and shoot the five balls. If you get three or more in a line, you win.

This is also one of the few games that had a manual ball lifter. It didn't matter if you shot all five balls at once...there were no features that depended on you doing something before a certain ball was shot, and there were no extra balls.

The payouts were adjustable by the operator using plugs inside the machine. Bally provided different award cards for the operator to display on the playfield. The main adjustement was for the 5-in-line score, which could be as low as 100.

six-card games

Most games enable one card per coin/credit guaranteed, but a few enable the additional cards on mystery intervals.

Individual numbers light on all enabled cards at the same time, and wins on each card were scored separately, although only the highest winner on each card counted (i.e. if you had two 3-in-line winners on the same card, you got paid for only one. If you had a 3-in-line and a 4-in-line on the same card, you got paid the 4-in-line amount).

To encourage maximum coins to be played, the payouts generally increased for successive cards. The max payout for a game is usually only obtainable on card #6.