Gottlieb’s Cleopatra holds an honored place in the company’s history as its very first solid-state pinball machine. Released in December 1977 on the new System 1 hardware, it marked the storied manufacturer’s leap into the electronic age — and in a sign of just how transitional the moment was, Cleopatra was produced in both electromechanical and solid-state forms, identical in every gameplay and scoring respect. Designed by the legendary Gottlieb pairing of Ed Krynski and artist Gordon Morison, it wraps that technical milestone in a richly colored ancient-Egyptian theme.
The playfield is classic Gottlieb: clean, geometric, and built around thoughtful shot-making. The scoring puzzle centers on pairing each top-lane color with its matching target in the five-bank to advance your bonus, a satisfying bit of pattern play that rewards aim over button-mashing. The side scoops dish out double bonus, and there’s repeatable value hiding everywhere for the patient — milking the outer loops at 5,000 a rollover when the stars are registering, or knocking down the center drops to expose a 5,000-point target you can hammer again and again.
As the machine that ushered Gottlieb into the solid-state era, Cleopatra is historically important, but it’s also just a lovely, approachable game in its own right — the kind of well-balanced, elegantly laid-out table the company built its reputation on. For collectors charting pinball’s technological turning point, this Egyptian classic is an essential and thoroughly enjoyable piece of the story.