Xenon

Unlike other Bally electronic pinball games, their documentation for this game shows the model number only as 1196, not 1196-E. This is the first talking Bally game, using the AS-2518-56 sound board and the AS-2518-57 "Vocalizer" board instead of the "Squawk and Talk" system. Electronic music composer Suzanne Ciani composed the music and performed all of the voices for Xenon. You can learn more about Ciani's involvement in Xenon at her former official website, now archived, which has a lot of information about this game. Pinball art collector Harold Balde reports this information to accompany his image of an experimental playfield overlay: Bally experimented with printing the artwork on mylar then attaching it to the playfield as a cost savings measure. The artwork is not the same as the production Xenon - Paul Faris went back and airbrushed the art to make it look better for the 4-color process. At least one or two games were made with this overlay. Artist Paul Faris told us that he recalls there was a problem of applying those mylar overlays accurately after the boards had been routed and the inserts glued in.