Bally’s NBA Fastbreak, released in 1997 and designed by George Gomez, is one of the most genuinely original machines ever built — because it keeps score like an actual basketball game. Forget millions and billions: here you earn 1, 2, and 3 points, and a strong game might end somewhere in the low hundreds, just like a real NBA matchup. That single bold idea makes Fastbreak unlike anything else on the floor, and it’s backed by a charming mechanical backbox animation featuring a flipper and a basket that the game itself sometimes controls.

The play is fast and combo-driven. You make shots from each of the four upper saucers to start multiball — moving between them with the flipper buttons — and rack up points through hoop modes lit by pop-bumper hits, where mode shots are worth the precious 3 points. There’s a delightful skill layer in the backbox basket: when you hear a whistle after a basket, you press the lockbar button for a free-throw point, and the Pizza Power Shots mode turns the whole thing into a backbox shooting contest.

The quirks are part of the charm — there’s no end-of-ball bonus, so you can nudge fearlessly to save a ball, and at midnight the game erupts into Midnight Madness multiball with everything worth 3 points. Built around combos, the championship chase, and that unforgettable real-basketball scoring, NBA Fastbreak is a Gomez original that still feels fresh decades later — a true one-of-a-kind.