S1E6: Bally — The Showman

Every industry has a company that understands spectacle better than its competitors. In pinball, that company was Bally.Episode 6 is the story of Raymond Moloney — the Chicago showman who named his first machine Ballyhoo and spent the next fifty years living up to it. We trace Bally's journey from the coin-op explosion of the 1930s through the licensed theme revolution of the 1970s, when the company put Elton John, Evel Knievel, and KISS on pinball machines and invented an entirely new reason to play. We also give Bally its technical due — the bumper, the audio innovations, the solid-state transition — because behind all the flash was a company that genuinely knew how to build a machine.Bally didn't just make pinball louder. It changed what pinball was allowed to be.