Here’s one of pinball’s great phantoms — Bally’s Big Foot, an electromechanical two-player built around the myth-and-legend theme of the elusive cryptid, and carrying one of the most extraordinary production figures in the entire hobby: a confirmed run of just two machines. Conceived and designed by Ron Halliburton with art by Dick White, Big Foot was essentially a prototype that never reached production, making it one of the rarest and most tantalizing curiosities in all of pinball history.
The layout offers a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been: two flippers, four pop bumpers, a pair of slingshots, seven standup targets, and two spinning targets. Those twin spinning targets and the generous seven standups suggest a lively, well-appointed playfield, the kind of solid design that could have earned a place on the route had the production lines ever truly rolled. Instead, it remains a fascinating road not taken, a machine whose ideas lingered as a near-mythical rarity rather than a fixture of the arcade floor — fitting, perhaps, for a game about a creature that famously eludes capture.
For the collector and historian, Big Foot is the stuff of legend precisely because it barely exists. A confirmed run of two puts it in the rarefied company of pinball’s greatest ghosts, the prototypes and cancelled projects that fuel endless fascination among enthusiasts. Its cryptid theme makes the extreme rarity almost poetic — a machine as hard to find as the legendary beast it depicts. You’ll almost certainly never play one, and that’s exactly what makes it so compelling. For the lover of the hobby’s deepest, rarest lore, this Bally phantom is a holy grail hiding in the mists. Chase the legend and, if you ever spot one, drop a coin.