Southern Belle

The Sample game pictured in this listing is stamped as such by Gottlieb on its cabinet bottom, while its serial number 7716 has no letter "S" after it. The coin door has a generic art design, in contrast to the cabinet art, and therefore might look like an after-factory replacement. However, Gottlieb was known to do this, and indeed the flyer shows the game with the same generic door. On the back of the coin door is a crayoned '49' that matches a crayoned '49' on the cabinet inside-bottom board. This may be an Inspection number. The owner nicely annotated an image of the Sample serial number. One can see how Gottlieb's automatic indexing stamp worked. It suggests a rather large drum-type metal stamp unit where the numbers rotated on these drums as the serial number increased. It also had the double number prefixes and the game ID letter suffixes (for production games the suffix would be SB). For this sample game, both the prefix numbers and the suffix S (or SB) were indexed out of the way to make blank areas in the stamping. One can clearly see the bottom of an S and the top of a T surrounding the blank area where either the S or SB would be. Also annotated are images of underneath the playfield showing how the ground wire path was first penciled in by Gottlieb engineers before the ground wire was laid down. This is evidence of an Engineering Sample game. The A-B-C inserts in the Sample lower playfield are different than production games. The paper apron cover uses slightly different formatting of text and arrows. Notably, the small 5th ball light was replaced on production games with an elevated Game Over plastic, probably to clarify to the player what it meant when the 5th ball drained from the playfield, as the flippers would still be active at this point. The Game Over relay, which cut power to the flippers, did not appear on Gottlieb games until Gottlieb's 1957 'Royal Flush'.