Name: Daishogai - 大障害
Year: 1970
Company: さとみ (Satomi — Sammy)
Daishogai was released in 1970, and was amongst the games listed at Expo '70.
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| All Japan Amusement Park 1970-11 |
This is a skill-based game where you rotate the knob to guide a ball down the tracks and into a winning hole on the bottom. You can learn more about this style of game in the Niche Mechanisms 004: Rotation article, section 2-2: Rotation - Fire Escape style. This style of game has been around since at least 1936.
In 1968, the USA company Irving Kaye released the game Steeplechase.
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| 1968 Steeplechase by Irving Kaye |
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| Coin Box 1968-05-18 |
Daishogai seemingly utilizes some of the same hardware as Steeplecase, or is at least probably copied from it.
Steeplechase has a handle to shoot the ball up on the left side, Daishogai on the front. Daishogai has a singular goal to enter to win a prize, while Steeplechase gives you multiple balls to build a higher score for amusement's sake.
On Steeplechase, and on every other version of this style of game, the ball alternates direction on each platform.
Daishogai has two places where the ball travels down the same side, 2 levels in a row! This seems like a mistake in the design, but I also wonder if they had a shortage of some of the parts?
I do not think Steeplechase was a big seller. It would certainly be possible that some of their parts were purchased by Satomi, especially when we consider that Satomi seemingly has a history of purchasing parts of foreign games to build new games.
This ball path does not seem to be an error made for the flyer. In the 1973 photo above, we can see this odd ball path: Left, left, right, left, left, right, left, right.
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