1973 Gottlieb Jungle Life Add-A-Ball Wedgehead Pinball Machine! Rare alternate cabinet, cool game!

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's video games back with another really cool arcade game we figured we would shoot a video of this is a really old pinball machine today we figured we'd show off a little bit we just finished it up it's a really cool game so we figured we'd uh share it with everyone this is 1973 here really old so this would predate all but the earliest arcade games I believe I think pong wada came out before that but in the 70s people were playing a lot of pinball and this is a Gottlob this is got libs jungle life got live was kind of running things in the 70s as far as pinball machines went and this is an interesting one for a lot of reasons that for a while what they were doing was they were making multiple versions of the same exact game so they made this game called jungle that was a four player game as a pretty cool game basically most of the player revolves around these rollover targets here numbered one through ten and a pop up here in the middle and that's kind of the whole thing but so they made this game called jungle and it sold really well so then they made another one called wild life so there was jungle and then wildlife wildlife was the two-player version so it's the same game same cabinet same everything except it was a two-player version instead of a four player version and if you know about working on these electromechanical games again this is 1973 in the back box there's lots of machinery for each reel so if it's a four player there's tons of stuff in a very heavy game and then so after they made the two-player the four player was successful the two players successful so then they made their their famous wedge head version so they call these wedge heads because as you can see the head of it it's kind of shaped like a wedge and Gottlob made most of their wedge heads or one player games and they're little so the back box is a little thinner because again you don't need as much stuff back there and it was just kind of a thing that was successful for him so they did it every time they got an opportunity basically they made to wedge head versions of this same game again this is the same game as jungle and it's wildlife and then they made one for America called a jungle time I think something like that jungle time maybe and then they made this one jungle life and from what I understand this was only made to export export overseas this is what they call an add a ball version a DD add a ball and I'll explain that to you here in a minute kind of interesting and it was kind of designed to skirt laws back in the day about gambling and so this was an ad a ball version there was also though the American had a ball version with a slightly different name slightly different back that's on the American a Duvall version see how it says balls to play right here well that will light up when you play it one two three four five and it tells you how many balls you have left every time you start a game you get five balls well then the only American version it says jungle time I think it is up here jungle time and then down here at the bottom where this says jungle life it said one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and it said balls to play above it so on the Gottlieb's you could actually add balls but you could if you want if you want an extra ball you can add balls above your five balls so you can see here on the instructions it says minimum five balls per play now the whole reason for all of that was in some places I don't know about overseas but here in America in some places it was actually illegal to win a free game while you were playing the game and so since this is a single-player really there's not much reason to play it if you can't win something right I mean people want to win something so on most pinball machines you know you could win a free game and it's kind of exciting to try to get a high enough score where you win a free game or you know hit the special shot where you win a free game and so back then you know as kind of pinball machines were for a long time just pretty and complicated and electromechanical ways to gamble and that's just the truth of it I mean they were fun and everything but we look at them today is a lot different than people looked at them then and again we're looking at one from the 70s which is really old but this would have been the newest thing out of course in 1973 and they would have been just a few years removed from games that didn't even have flippers you know flippers had only been around maybe what 15 years by that point so that would be like its 2015 right now this that would be like me saying that a flippers were invented in the year 2000 I mean that's no time really so anyway before games had flippers they were really all about gambling and of course the the bingo machines that they made even after the flipper machines came around we're still about gambling so in a lot of locations law enforcement solace is a big problem oh man these people is ruining the youth that they're gambling and winning a free game which cost a dime we're on this one check this out five cents for one play 25 cents for five plays ten cents for two plays today literally were complaining that people were gambling for a nickel you know it's a different time folks so anyway and it was only certain places that were like that so Gottlob designed some of these games and the other companies did too that they called a de bal games and you could put this in a location that gambling was illegal in because you could not win a free game on this game there's no way to win a free game you could win extra balls you could add a ball to your game while you were playing it which you know the reason that law enforcement stayed and it's not all law enforcement just some law enforcement the reason that they stated that they didn't want people winning credits on the machine free games on the machine is because you could theoretically sell the credits and of course on the bingo machines of that ones that were straight-up gambling machines people did sell the credits you could sell it back to the owner and he would hit a button to knock off the credits off but on the unlike a regular machine let's say I won four free games or whatever well I could sell them to the guy behind me for a dime or whatever I mean they literally were complaining about that but on this game you win extra balls now in some locations it was even illegal to put on the game that they had won an extra ball think about that I mean it's craziness and you know you still see that with some of the laws that are around now you still see crazy laws and you think why in the world are they such sticklers about this long but back then they had similar things so on the on the card again it says minimum five balls per play so the way they did it was it says balls to play one two three four five well if it would have lit up six then that means though you just won something of value you gambled right so the way Gottlob got around this was down here in the bottom of the art and you know all the people that played knew this you know if you were if you were into the pinball scene you would know all about this but down here at the bottom they have these five little red flowers and sure enough if you're playing this game and you win a free ball and I'll show you how to do that here in a second if you win a free ball it was light up that little red dot and so then you would know that you had however many balls to play left it said five or however many it is and you'd have one over here when your ball ended instead of the five going to four the red light would go out and you'd get another ball craziness that they had to go through all the trouble to do this but it's also brilliant that they were able to pull it all for real if you think about it these are these games for electromechanical the only thing that they have in them is motors switches and coils and they make everything work with that so it's actually pretty fun these at a ball games are actually pretty fun and a lot of people like to play them because let's say you start the game it says five balls to play well the way you get a free ball is you hit all ten roll over targets ten nine eight seven six five four three two one and of course every game would be different but this is how this one was and so once you do that it lights up what got them called there Wow Wow when lit so it will light up that light or over here it says Wow when lit so if we light up that light and that will go back and forth either this won't be lit up or that one will be lit up and only after you've got all ten roll overs and the way that goes back and forth is whenever you hit the slingshots for one point or hit that switch for one point or that switch for one point it'll all turn eight it so if this one's lit up and you hit that switch it'll make this one light up so anyway while it's lit up if you hit the target one of those two around the king of the jungle there if you hit either one of those targets while it's lit up you get an extra ball and so it lights up that little target once you know pretty cool and here's the here's the thing that made an add a ball game different than any other pinball machine or any other type of pinball machine you could win more than one whenever you hit that it didn't go out it would just stay like that you could hit it over and over and over again so if you were good enough you could win you could light up all five of those flowers so you could win a total of 25 extra balls on each Bowl so whenever if it said five balls per play or you know what actually Hecky could win even more than that because you could you could play them down and then win more so you know that you can play this for quite a while because you could have five and then these five down here lit up so you could actually have ten balls still in the machine and then lose one and then win it back by doing the roll overs again so again it's just another interesting way to to make a fun game and you can see up there a but another interesting thing the score could get really high because you're you're doing a lot of stuff here but once you got up above this house is fifteen thousand six hundred and thirty points well you could roll that over and once you roll it over to a hundred thousand it lights up this hundred thousand point light over here which is pretty cool but there you have it now an interesting thing about this particular game jungle life and I mean this particular one looking at right now is it's in the wrong cabinet I'm not sure what cabinet that is but it's not quite right if you look at pictures online of jungle life and jungle and wildlife and jungle time they're all it's in a different cabinet like it's the same color it's green and orange and it has a lot of like kind of swirling art which kind of looks kind of weird kind of looks I guess they were trying to make it look more like it was in the jungle so it's supposed to look like bushes or whatever but the art is wrong on this cabinet I don't know what game I don't know if there's there's three things going on either one there's another game with this art and at some point in time they switched everything out of the original cabinet into this cabinet that's kind of hard for me to believe but it could have happened it's probably actually the simplest answer or two I've seen other Gottlob games with this same design but there were different colors but it was a different title so I'm thinking maybe at the maybe they broke the stencil or something one day or something you know the way they painted these was I just held a big stencil up and then painted the orange and then held another stencil up and painted the green so maybe one day they broke the stencil with all stencils something and use the wrong stencil the the artwork for another cabinet we had a game called a space orbit that came out the sent the year before 1972 that had this design on it but it was red and black it wasn't orange and green so maybe they use the wrong stencil maybe accidentally or maybe the stencil broke or it could be that maybe this is a prototype game I don't know maybe this was one of the first ones you wouldn't think it would be though because again jungle came out before this one which used the other artwork and jungle was out probably six months before this one and also Wildlife came out before this one so I'm not sure why it's got the wrong art maybe this is just a different that maybe this is the art for another Gottlob game that I'm not familiar with and at some point they just swapped it I've looked around for a for a serial number on the cabinet and I couldn't find one but I'll keep looking there might be one inside or something but I don't see one on the on the outside of the usually they have them kind of punched in they'll have some numbers punched in but I don't see any on this one but I'll keep looking I'll take it back apart and see if I can find it inside it so I'll read over the instructions and then we'll play it a little bit so jungle life minimum five balls per play instructions points are scored as indicated so it means you know it tells you all over to play field what each shots met worth roll over button score 100 points and advance the bonus value so whenever you get those each one you roll over it'll turn the light out and then it'll make this bonus ladder and start going up and it can get all the way up to 10,000 because there's ten rollers completing the roll overs one through ten and you don't have to do them in order just all of them completing roll overs one through ten lights the Wow indicators for remainder of ball and play so we talked about that the wild value is one additional ball bonus is scored after the completion of ball and play so whenever the ball drains it starts counting down your bonus so it gives you you know if you add up to ten it'll give you 10,000 points multi bonus value when lit is two times the indicated bonus value so here it says multi bonus when lit and the way you light that is up here at the top it says when you get you go through that middle rollover it says 1,000 points and lights multi bonus and then you've got this pop bumper that's worth a thousand points each time now if you hit the ball from the bottom up into here you can see that the ball can't go anywhere it just bounces around a lot which gives you a bunch of points and sometimes it will ricochet up and hit that from the bottom too so works out pretty good then you got a couple gates over here it says gate open wind lit so if you make this little roll over so it says opens gate it opens this little thing which means that you can't go out the out Lane anymore and you can see that the mechanical action of that opening is what lights up the light super cool all right so if you if you roll through there it will open this gate so that you can't go up out lane if the ball bounces down here you'll either fall back out into the shooter lane or you'll fall into the end and then over here you've got another one and so this one says opens ball kicker gate same thing if you go through that outside role over there and it says ball kicker gate open wind lit and so the gate for it is down here so that opens which lights the light and then if the ball falls now it lands over here in a hole and there's a little coil in there that'll kick it back out onto the play field and usually it goes up into the thing where you get a thousand points which yeah really helps bounces around a lot so there you have it now this particular game is in pretty nice shape actually check out the play field Gottlob did a great job on the play field I go over here we see the light hit it look at that didn't touch up anything with just clean clean clean and wax wax wax and of course put new bulbs and new rubbers and everything on it it's not in mint shape but this thing is 42 years old not bad for 42 years old especially if it was actually in Italy like they claim this thing was built for so I'm wondering if maybe the cabinet thing is perhaps this was the American cabinet but again they had a different add a ball version for the American market with a different back glass and everything and it had the other cabinet so if somebody figures it out for me go ahead and reply in the comment section below oh and the back glass is also in very nice shape usually that Reds all faded this is some of got loves cool artwork that they did you got the little half-naked Tarzan guy you got a lion down here wondering what's going on you got the little flowers in the bottom says jungle life it's kind of a big ripoff of the Disney movie Jungle Book you've got a little guy here there's a rhinoceros there's an ape got a tiger I guess back there got a snake right here a little bird there another little bird there all right so there we go okay I'll set up the tripod we'll play a little bit all right folks pretty good light show it lights up nice this is a very clean wedge Edie - I mean it's still in pretty nice shape I'll play through it a little bit and again on the on this one pretty much the object is to light up all of the rollovers which lights up these two wild lights in the middle that will bounce back and forth so hopefully I can get it to do that but maybe not who knows and also this one set on five ball because that's just how it's set you can't change it to three ball because it's an add a ball game usually whenever I play games I always set them on three ball because it's just if you play a game with with five balls usually in my opinion it gets a little boring after a while a lot of people tend to put some of these older ones like this one five ball because they say that that's how it was sent from the factory but I don't think they were all like that I think the way that they used to do it on a regular not a Nadder ball but on a regular one was they would ship it out and most locations would put it on three ball and it was a pricing thing so basically you got three balls for a quarter or a dime or whatever and then I think whenever the game got a little old they would adjust it and make it where you got five balls for the same amount to kind of get people to keep playing it but I wasn't around back then so I can't say for sure but I think that's how it worked so but this particular one you get five balls so here we go I'll write my score reels of reset and says five balls to play so that got me my double bonus light at the bottom which is always good for multi bonuses they called it ah I'd like to get a couple of those good shots to where you can see how you can hit a bunch of them it with one uh the one shot so that guy number one ooh yeah like that I don't like I hit two though I think it skipped two but I got it okay so now I got everything on that side all right oh no a good thing about these though is they set it up which is it's brilliant that they were able to figure all this out and I get maybe it was easier to do it this way but they set it up where if you look my five are still out you might not be able to see it too good on the video just because of the glare and stuff but my five that I hit are still out even though the ball ended I'm on the next ball so now I've only got these five to make but if you get all ten and it lights up the wild light you only have it like that for that ball as soon as the ball drains it'll it'll reset it for the next ball now how come it didn't reset it for this ball you know it's just very well designed look well if there's like a sweet spot where if you hit it just right it doesn't uh come on there we go Oh sometimes it'll fall just right and hit every target on the way down play too many too many games trying to get a good left shot on it and you still get the bonus points whenever you roll over one that you've already rolled over even though it's turned off you still get a thousand points on your bonus hmm all right one ball left last ball got my double cool oh right down the middle horrible game over all right here we go I'll write everything reset got my one yeah get it uh got a couple I think I've never done it but theoretically you ought to be able to hit it just right and get all ten with one shot but I personally have never done that or even seen it and I don't think you can really backhand it either I don't think you can I don't think you can hit it up the hit it up the same side of that let the flippers on I got both gates open that helps oh it would have helped the game the gates don't stop it from going down the middle though unfortunately Oh one ball left ah dump date come on now I'm trying to show a feature here all right so I got 46,000 that time around this game this particular game you can get a really high score if you're good enough I mean you can literally roll it many many times in one game if you were good enough you can potentially play it forever because you can win free balls on every ball has a little better at the skill shot maybe you could skill shot it just right to where it hit the Arts troupe I thought I had it there for a minute it looked like it was going to do it alright hmm it's hard to make that that shot slow whenever the ball stopped or rolling real slow like this you can't it's hard to go wide with it because it uh you just can't it just the physics don't work if the ball is moving fast you can do it wide because it kind of throws it out a little different so it's on this game it's hard to just cradle the ball and then make it make that shot that you're trying to make that Center shot though you can make pretty easily and the two the two wild targets you can probably make pretty pretty easily I did backhand it back up in that area at least there we go that worked well if I could do it on the other side oh well it hold it alright so I've got the 7 8 the 9 and the 10 is what I need here we go yeah awesome so you see the wild lights are on hmm horrible and it reset it on me because it only lasts for that one ball horrible but you did see it kind of do the the cool little arc where it'll it'll knock out all five of them in one swoop that's the little kicker that's over there on the left there we go nice shot and got the double bonus this is my last ball though unless I get the unless I win another one which might happen I've got both uh both gates open hmm I need a nice shot to get all five of them there we go all right folks game over that is got lives cool jungle life don't see this one too often but again that you know there were three other versions jungle was the four player wildlife was the two player and then I think the one uh the one player one earlier I said it was a jungle time I think it's actually called Jungle King but uh there you go cool game lights up really nice got a got a great look to it and it's really fun really I mean but it's yes a lot of these Ian's were kind of one trick pony so this one's kind of like that you're just trying to get all the rollover targets and besides that there's not much to shoot out except that middle pop bumper if you're just trying to get points but I'm always trying to play it to win a free ball so but there you go by the time you see this video we may not even have jungle life anymore we may have already sold it maybe it's a swung on over to somebody else's home but you can see all the games that we do have available right now on our website you can go to lions arcade comm and check them out or you can stop by our shop and see them here in person we've got them all set up in a whole room full of them at all times we're in downtown Rock Hill which is about 15 minutes south of downtown Rock Hill South Carolina which is about 15 minutes south of Charlotte North Carolina like I said we keep in plenty of these and if you're not looking to buy a game or you're not in the area and you you're not going to get by that's fine just subscribe to us here on YouTube and we will be filming many many many many more videos of everything we get in that's cool like this so we will see you folks on the next video