Gottlieb’s Joker Poker, released in 1978 and designed by Ed Krynski, is one of the company’s earliest solid-state machines and a clever marriage of pinball and card play. Built on Gottlieb’s pioneering System 1 hardware, it arranges its drop targets as a deck — banks of 10s, Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces-plus-Joker — turning every game into a hand of poker played one shot at a time.
The scoring rewards knowing the deck. Completing a set of drops earns bonus that scales with the card’s rank: 10s pay 1,000, Jacks 2,000, Queens 3,000, Kings 4,000, and Aces-plus-Joker a full 5,000. The twist is that the drop set required for 5X bonus changes with every ball, so the strategy shifts as you go. Competitive players favor the Queens — a safe, central shot worth 3K for the first set and 5K thereafter — while saving the Kings for last, since they’re the toughest targets on the whole playfield. Completing the A-B-C or Aces/Joker drops lights a valuable extra ball.
Smart, strategic, and elegantly themed, Joker Poker is a fine example of early Gottlieb System 1 design and a genuinely engaging card-game puzzle. For collectors who love a thinking player’s drop-target game with a gambling hook, it’s a rewarding and historically notable classic worth anteing up for.