Bally Manufacturing Co.

Bally Manufacturing was a Chicago pinball and coin-operated game maker founded on January 10, 1932, when Raymond Moloney's Lion Manufacturing set up a new company to build pinball games, taking its name from its first title, Ballyhoo — itself named for a popular humor magazine of the day. Ballyhoo sold more than 50,000 units at $16.50 apiece within seven months, and Bally grew quickly into one of Chicago's major amusement makers, adding gambling equipment to its line in the late 1930s. During World War II the company turned to military production, earning an Army-Navy "E" Award in 1943.

Moloney died in 1958, and the company drifted until an investor group led by longtime sales executive William O'Donnell bought Lion Manufacturing's assets and the Bally name for $2.85 million on June 17, 1963. Under the new owners Bally came to dominate the slot machine business — its 1964 Money Honey was the first electromechanical slot — while on the pinball side, designer Ted Zale's zipper flippers, three-ball multiball, and asymmetrical layouts reshaped the company's games through the 1960s and beyond. Reincorporated as Bally Manufacturing Corporation in 1968 and taken public the following year, the company bought Franklin Park's Midway Manufacturing in 1969, and in 1982 folded its pinball division into it to form the combined Bally Midway. Bally's licensed pinball titles of the era — Wizard!, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Eight Ball, Kiss, and Eight Ball Deluxe — ran alongside Midway-built arcade licenses like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.

Bally sold its amusement games division to rival Williams Electronics in 1988 as the parent company turned its focus to casinos and lotteries. Williams kept building pinball machines under the Bally name afterward, including The Addams Family (1992) and Twilight Zone (1993), until its parent, WMS Industries, shut down pinball production entirely on October 25, 1999 — closing out both the Williams and Bally lines. The Bally name today belongs to an unrelated casino company, while the classic Bally pinball catalog lives on through Planetary Pinball Supply, which has held the license to the Williams and Bally games since 2014.