Jack in the box

Jack in the box is Bensa s.a.s.'s single-player rebuild of Gottlieb’s Jack In The Box, one of several Gottlieb designs the Milan maker reproduced without licence as bootleg copies.^[1] It carries over the American game’s Circus treatment: where Gottlieb’s four-player table was built around a ten-bank of drop targets and spun off a two-player twin, Jumping Jack, Bensa reduced the layout to a single player.^[2] Collectors have singled out its drop targets — which fall flat into the playfield rather than simply dropping — as the clearest tell of the Gottlieb source,^[3] and noted that even the coin door was made to pass for a Gottlieb’s, part of the close mimicry that marked the firm’s remanufacturing through the mid-1970s.^[4]