Sinbad Adventures

The playfield is a redesign of Gottlieb's 1978 'Sinbad', and the backglass shows a longer name of 'Sinbad Adventures'. Other pinball reference materials indicate a 4-player Solid State version named 'Sinbad' was produced cooperatively in 1979 by Europlay and Bell Games. The Italian magazine ad in this listing shows this Europlay game having the black score reels used by Gottlieb in the late 1970's to give a digital scoring effect to the display. Also, the cabinet has the name incorrectly spelled as "Simbad". We asked Federico Croci, a collector in Italy, to comment on this. He replies: "I've never seen 'Sinbad' equipped with those black score reels except for the one featured in the magazine ad. Actually, those Gottlieb black score reels were not popular and were always removed, even on the original Gottlieb games that were produced with them installed. "Also, the 'Simbad' doesn't exist. It was a misspelling on the cabinet of the sample game used for the photo of the ad. If you look closely at the ad, you can read the name on the backglass, which was 'Sinbad'. They also misspelled the name in the text of the ad, but that's not an official ad, just a page from a local reseller of the game, which I suppose reprinted the sample photo received from the manufacturer, the one with the misspelled name, and so they printed it wrong in the ad." Sinbad (Sindbad) the Sailor was a character in one of the folk tales of classic Arabic literature known collectively as The Thousand and One Nights (aka The Arabian Nights).