Star Ship

The backglass shows the spaceship from the 1960's TV show 'Star Trek', also depicted on Bally's 1979 'Star Trek'. The playfield is identical in design to Bally's 1979 'Supersonic'. The game pictured here was found for sale on a gas station bulletin board near Dekalb, Illinois in 2008. The seller had purchased it from a retired executive. We asked designer Greg Kmiec how many units of this game were actually made. He replies:As I remember, only 1 engineering sample playfield and cabinet of Star Ship were made. Two backglasses were made, one for the game and one for art registration. We subsequently received a picture of a second, NOS playfield, for this listing. Greg Kmiec also explains why this game never went into production but instead was later used to make Supersonic:I had just designed Wizard and Capt. Fantastic. I quickly went on to design a whitewood game called "Super Shooter" with two S's as bonus lights. That game was renamed "Star Ship" probably because of the bonus lights, and a futuristic art theme was added. Bally had just realized it was a bonus to manufacture licensed games like Wizard and Capt. Fantastic. (It distinguished Bally from the rest of the pack.) Bally went out and procured the Star Trek license. I had just done two licensed games. Bally management hired a new designer and gave him the Star Trek license in order to spread licensed games among the four designers. After Star Ship was done, I was already working on Night Rider EM, a game that was themed after the then popular CB radio fad. It was imperative to get a CB-themed game in the market ASAP. Night Rider was deemed too good of a game to change its name. (Changing "Night Rider" to "Star Trek" would have delayed a CB-themed game by about a year. In retrospect, the drop target banks probably could have spelled S-T-A-R T-R-E-K. But it all worked out, as Night Rider SS became the test game for Bally solid state games.) So there was "Star Ship", a complete game all designed with artwork, with the two S's as bonus lights, [while the Star Trek license had been assigned to another designer]. What was Bally to do? "Star Ship" was designed as an economy game in a "push" market. What that meant was that because of the success of Wizard and Capt. Fantastic, Bally was able to "push" game orders to distributors instead of distributors "pulling" game orders from Bally. And the bonus to Bally was that these "push" games were inexpensive to make but sold just as many as other games. Bally didn't want to kill the "Star Ship" game. Therefore, a new theme, "Supersonic", was created, to take into account the two bonus light S's. (And, "Supersonic" is a spacey sounding theme.) In a game designed from scratch, the "T" of "SST" would have had bonus lights in it. To my knowledge, Supersonic is the only Bally game that had two production names, "Star Ship" and "Supersonic."