Back to school — Bally’s Campus Queen is an electromechanical four-player wrapped in a cheerful college-life theme, designed by the prolific Ted Zale. With reel scoring and a confirmed run of 1,125, it’s a handsome woodrail-era piece with a genuinely distinctive zipper-flipper feature and a satisfying gate-and-target strategy.
The layout has a clever, tactical heart: two flippers, three pop bumpers, five mushroom bumpers, three slingshots, and three ball return gates. The zipper flippers here are controlled by the bumpers in a genuinely novel way — the blue number-2 mushroom bumper zips the flippers up (closing the drain gap), while the red number-1 and number-3 mushroom bumpers unzip them, adding a distinctive strategic wrinkle to keep track of. On the scoring front, hitting targets numbered 1 through 5 opens the bottom gate for 500 points, and the number-6 target opens the top gate for another 500, giving a player clear, rewarding objectives. Those three ball return gates and the mushroom-controlled zipper flippers make for an engaging, tactical game.
Campus Queen is a fine example of Ted Zale’s electromechanical craft, pairing a breezy college theme with a genuinely clever zipper-flipper mechanic tied to the bumpers. That interplay — zipping and unzipping the flippers via specific bumpers — gives the game real strategic texture, rewarding a player who tracks the state of their flippers. For the collector who loves the golden age of EM pinball and its clever mechanical wrinkles, it’s a rewarding find. Watch those zip and unzip bumpers, open the gates with the numbered targets, and reign as campus queen. Some machines add a genuinely distinctive twist to the formula, and this Zale college classic does exactly that. Hit the quad and drop a coin.