Toys

Toys are the sculpted figures and mechanical contraptions a pinball machine carries to act out its theme, mounted on, above or even beneath the playfield, and usually built for one game alone.^[1] The name comes straight from the toy box: the pieces are called toys largely because they look like children’s playthings.^[2]

What a toy does varies as widely as what it depicts. Many are pure scenery — Static Toys the ball plays around, never against. Interactive Toys join the game instead, ranging from an ordinary mechanism in costume — a hand or claw that grabs the ball where a plain hole would swallow it^[3] — to a device the whole game is organized around.^[4]

The toy became a signature of Williams and Bally machines in the early 1990s, when complicated mechanical devices were part of what drew new players to the game.^[5] Funhouse (1990, Williams) is built around Rudy, a talking head that opens its mouth at midnight so the player can shoot a ball into it;^[6] on The Addams Family (1992, Bally) a disembodied hand named Thing picks the ball off the playfield by magnet and spirits it below,^[7] and Twilight Zone (1993) carries both a gumball machine that stores and releases balls and a working analog clock.^[8] The Addams Family set the modern sales record at 20,270 machines,^[9] and by the decade’s end whole games were organized around a single toy: the animated castle of Medieval Madness (1997) lowers its drawbridge and raises its portcullis under a battering of balls.^[10][11]

The toy also sells the machine. Stern grades the editions of a title partly by its toys: on Godzilla (2021) the Premium and Limited Edition models carry a motorized skyscraper whose collapsing floors redirect shots while the Pro model gets a static building,^[12] and on Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye (2026) the Soundwave figure that locks pinballs behind a working cassette door is absent from the Pro model altogether.^[13][14]