Big Foot

The physical measurements of this game were originally given to us unconfirmed as 4 feet by 10 feet, and one picture in this listing shows it was equipped with a coin door. The Play Meter article quotes a Bally representative as saying the possibility existed that this giant game could go into production if interest was there. According to GameRoom magazine articles: This game started as a handmade prototype game made by designers Ron Halliburton and Jack Pearson of Arcade Engineering, with artwork by Roland Berrios. Jack said Bally sent them a game to work with in creating this prototype. Jim Patla stated he was pretty certain the game sent was Bally's 1975 'Bow and Arrow' based on playfield similarities between the two games. Arcade Engineering submitted the prototype to Bally for consideration to put it into production. Jim said only two Bigfoot games were made by Bally although extra backglasses were also made. Jim checked with Margaret Hudson who told him neither she nor Paul Faris did the art for the Bally version (as previously believed), but that it was done by Dick White and his brother (both were staff artists). A 1985 legal document recorded the playfield as being 4 feet by 8 feet. Bally decided not to put this game into production and it went back to Arcade Engineering, who then sold the rights to Atari, who then made their giant game Atari's 1979 'Hercules'. We asked Allan Reizman, Engineering Lab Supervisor at Bally from 1977 to 1983, to talk about why this game did not go into production and what Atari may have done differently than Bally in producing their Hercules game. He replies: Bigfoot was well into development when I arrived at Bally as a lab intern in 1977. We had received a field test game a few weeks before that I think came from the Great America Amusement Park near Chicago and that had been used the previous season. One of my first tasks was to pick up the pieces (literally) of that game and determine why it failed. Once I had the game partially assembled, the flaws were pretty obvious. The game had shaken itself apart! When one of the thumper bumpers would go "kerchunk", the vibrations would cause all the lamps to burn out! Besides the lamp failures, the cabinet was separating at the seams, the coils were breaking loose, wires had become separated, and on and on. The fatal design flaw was building Bigfoot to the same standards as a normal sized pin. What soon became obvious was that oversized components such as the bumpers put out double the vibration and double the stress on the body. Screws needed to be larger. Cabinet seams needed to be stronger. Every connection needed to be substantially reinforced to withstand the stresses of such a game. Atari did things a bit differently with Hercules. First off, it was solid state. The controlled direct current of solid state games allowed for a smoother and less violent bumping action of the coils. Next, they free-mounted many of their lamps which, when combined with regulated DC, gave them longer life. Atari also improved and mounted their components in a more shock-resistant manner. All in all, Hercules was far more successful as a trial of the larger-than-life pin. Unfortunately, these games were unsuccessful financially and the jumbo pinball experiment died. While all the engineering issues could be fixed, albeit at greater cost and weight, the marketing failures could not be overcome. The games were just impractical. Too large and heavy to build and ship, and too limited a market where they could be deployed. If it could have been proven the cashbox earnings justified the cost and space required to put one of these games on location, things might have turned out differently. But even at a hefty 50 cents per play (twice the game play price at the time), the games did not garner significantly more cashbox earnings than a regular-sized pin. An operator could put 3 or 4 other games in the same space and earn 3-4 times the income. Today, you have to have a lot of space and commitment to set up one of these in a collection. When we moved our offices from Belmont Avenue in Chicago to Bensenville, I found a stack of the Plexiglas backglasses in the old lab building and hung one on my wall at home for years. Unfortunately, I sold it at a Chicagoland show some years ago and now I regret doing so. It was quite a conversation starter. Jack Pearson credits Ron Halliburton with the conception of the the Giant Pinball idea and as the designer of this game. He also shares with us the following information:To reduce the development time and cost, Bally sent us a new pinball game from their production line before we started work on Bigfoot. We played and studied that game until we understood how the game logic worked. For example, hit targets A, B, and C, then the target D doubles when hit. By understanding the game logic, we could create a new table layout without having to redesign the electronics. There were limitations when doing a new table layout. For example, if the Bally Pinball had 3 thumper bumpers, our table had to have a max of 3. However, we could reposition the thumper bumpers. The flippers and thumper bumpers required much more power than the Bally game so we had to build our own more powerful solenoids. Bally sent us one of their production pinballs. We gutted that game, taking the electronic and wiring harness. We took the harness and electronics and put that in Bigfoot. I rented a U-haul and personally drove the truck from our facility in Florida to deliver the prototype to Bally. After a few months, Bally decided they did not want to put the game into production and returned the prototype to us (Arcade Engineering). We, in turn, then licensed the game to Atari and shipped the prototype to them. I do not remember how many they produced. I do know the game had to be re-engineered as the prototype was designed just to test and many parts were one of a kind hand made. 'Bigfoot' appeared on a USA television special "US Against The World" in which celebrities from the USA competed in different sports with celebrities from the UK and the rest of the world. This NBC-TV special originally aired on Wednesday, September 7th, 1977. A different backglass was used on this show. If you own one of these two games, or know someone who does, please contact us.