Future Spa

'Future Spa' was the first game from this manufacturer to use continuous background sound. The first pinball machine from any manufacturer to do this was Williams' 1978 'Flash'. Patent 4,257,604 [IN-LINE DROP TARGETS] filed June 4, 1979. Granted March 24, 1981 to Irwin J. Grabel and Glenn R. Andersen. Assignee is Bally Manufacturing Company, Chicago, Illinois. Bally's new sound board for this was previously tested on a few specially modified Bally's 1979 'Voltan Escapes Cosmic Doom'. See that listing for more information. In the book Pinball Snapshots, Paul Faris tells the author that with the deadline for this game approaching, Dave Christensen was not going to be able to finish the playfield in time to work on the glass. So, Paul painted the backglass while Dave finished the playfield. The penciled drawings of the backglass and playfield, shown in this listing, were made by Dave Christensen. The backglass drawing shows the pre-production name (the working title) for this game was 'Bon Vivant'. Also shown is his black line drawing. It uses cut and taped letters and numbers to do the mock-up for some of the insert values. The manufacturer flyer shows a cabinet having a strong red color. We show pictures of a cabinet attributed to Renault that also have this red cabinet. We also show pictures of a pink-colored cabinet. We don't know if color fade is responsible for this pink color. Pictures attributed to Schneider show severe cabinet fade.