Bally Wulff

Bally Wulff — today Bally Wulff Games & Entertainment GmbH — is a German maker of Geldspielgeräte, the money-prize gaming machines of the German market, with both its headquarters and its factory in Berlin.^[1] The company was founded in 1950 by Günter Wulff as Günter Wulff Apparatebau,^[2] and reckons itself among the country’s leading and most influential gaming-machine manufacturers.^[3]

For roughly two decades it belonged to the American pinball and slot-machine giant Bally, which took over Günter Wulff Apparatebau and renamed it Bally Wulff.^[4] It stayed under Bally’s ownership from the early 1970s until 1991, when Bally, paying down debt, spun the German subsidiary back out as an independent company.^[5]

Almost the whole of Bally Wulff’s footprint in pinball belongs to those Bally years. As the group’s German arm it built licensed, German-market editions of Bally Midway Manufacturing Company’s Solid State Pinball machines — its Eight Ball Champ of Eight Ball Champ, its Party Animal of Party Animal, and likewise Motordome, Beat the Clock, Cybernaut and Lady Luck — each finished in Berlin under a cabinet legend reading “Produced by: Bally Wulff, Berlin, West Germany under Licence of Bally Midway Mfg Company, USA”.^[6] Bally Wulff’s own Fireball Classic, its edition of Bally Midway’s 1985 Fireball Classic, is noted in the databases simply as “made in Germany under license from Bally Midway”.^[7]

A handful of titles the Berlin house reworked more openly, printing fresh backglasses in its own screen-printing shop. Bally Midway’s Special Force was reissued as Special Force Girls with new artwork after its American backglass was judged too militaristic — a decision designer Dennis Nordman later recounted^[8] — and its Hardbody, which Bally Wulff sold as Hardbody, was rebadged again as Super Sport with its bodybuilder pin-up redrawn more modestly after operators complained, in a switch a Bally Wulff advertisement announced under the line “Less sex in the game”.^[9] The replacement art was the work of Berlin artist Mychael Gerstenberger.^[10]

After Bally’s exit the firm changed hands again — to the Schmidt Group in 2007 and to the Czech gaming company APEX in 2022.^[11] It never returned to pinball, and it remains one of Germany’s foremost gaming-machine makers, still headquartered in Berlin^[12] with additional operations in Spain.^[13]