Kiss w/blue displays ??
flipper
me says he picked one up from a neighbor down the road........ what's
it worth? Blue displays, swing open head door, no on /off
switch , key pad? like 6803?? no serial # but a plaque that says N/
T experimental model 1152-3 and paperwork that claims original
owner received it june 29 of '82. he says its
"mint" ........ mr. pinball says only 11 made . who's interested
in such a prize?
Craig C
machine?
-c
John Wart, jr
You need to talk to Pat Choy, I think he knows the story.
--
--john
CARGPB34
http://www.myhomegameroom.com
Columbus, Indiana USA
flipper
I can find him.... and Jim Patla actually. I did find this on IPDB
which I'd never heard about......... but with no mention of a plastic
cabinet I'm not in the truck yet. can you imagine the 1st and only
talking bally game. I was at AMOA when Gorgar came out and cannot
remember a talking Kiss......I was like everyone else gawking at
Gorgar. DAMM
Gary,
Shortly before I left Bally in the spring of 1983 I was crawling
around the warehouse across the street from the old Bensenville
factory. Under some dusty tarps I found a forlorn looking Kiss Pinball
machine uniquely identifiable in it's special fiberglass cabinet.
While it's place in history has been long forgotten by most I still
remember the tale.
The story goes back to the summer of 1979. Williams was the number 2
manufacturer of Pinball and needed a gimmick to jump themselves up to
#1.
Bally was playing it safe with simple yet artistic inspired games like
Kiss, Star trek, Paragon, and Dolly Patron. These games were
simplistic but relied on some of the most inspired artwork ever put on
an amusement game to draw attention and keep the public interested.
Speech had been something we at Bally had thought out but seemed
hardly necessary at the time to develop as the technology of the day
was rather crude and expensive. Bally had developed, from outside
consultants, a primitive bank of memory chips tied to a D-A chip that
could re-produce a few seconds of barely intelligible speech.
Enter Williams. Williams went to the next level that year and
introduced, a few weeks before the Chicago AMOA show, a new game,
Gorgar, that could talk.
The talk was primitive and hard to understand, but was just
intelligible enough to shock the game world. The buzz was this was to
be the hit of the upcoming show. Bally management panicked. Something
had to be done immediately to prove to the pinball world that we were
still #1!
Summoned from the lame idea warehouse was a one of kind, experimental,
white fiberglass cabinet. Into the lab came the primitive bank of
boards placed into the cabinet that could barely say, "Get the K!",
and, "KISS!" Once hastily assembled in the old lab on Belmont Ave, the
talking Kiss was displayed downtown Chicago at the AMOA show. Gorgar
screamed "Gorgar" and was answered by an almost as loud, "Kiss!".
That show marked the beginning of the rise of Williams and the decline
of Bally. While Williams would sell thousands of Gorgars the talking
Kiss would be spirited away to a warehouse and not see the light of
day for many years.
Following the 1979 show the AMOA put noise levels in place to quiet
future shouting matches but that summer was magical as the last
Pinball dominated show. Space Invaders would lead to Pac Man and the
video game would rise up to dominate the industry. Bally continued to
produce uninspired games like Harlem Globetrotters, and future spa and
did not produce a talking game for more than a year later with Xenon.
By then Williams had upped the ante with innovations like Multi-ball
and Multi levels. Bally never recovered and eventually would be
absorbed by Williams.
Allan Reizman
pinballjail
The KISS protos were designed around the Intel 8035 series of chips.
It also has an AY-3-8910 sound chip and circuitry right on the cpu. It
doesn't have sounds like a production KISS and no speech. The cabinet
is also different than the production machines.
David Gersic
> Allan Reizman
Wow. Now _there's_ a name I haven't seen around here in a while.
--
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