Lilja’s Soccer Coinop Game - From the Ol’ 70′th?

Yesterday, a friend gave me a cool gadget. It is a two player coin-op soccer-like game, fed with Swedish “25-öringar” (SEK 1/4, which is approximately EUR 1/40). Those coins were canceled at 1985, but my wild guess is that this game is quite a bit older than that. The game is completely mechanical, which means there are no digital technology involved. Not one single IC chip. The gameplay, coin mechanism, score counter, timer and controls are completely mechanical. It looks like it should be powered with four batteries, probably 9V each. However, it looks like someone has been trying replacing the batteries with some external power source, but I wouldn’t bet it worked. Over all, most of the mechanics seem to work. The springs, however, seem a little weak, which is probably natural, regarding to their age. And of course, all agile parts want some lubrication.

The playfield is made of flexible plastic. You have a ball with which you want to hit your opponent’s goal cage. If you do, your score meter will increase by one (from 0 to 11 maximum). After inserting a coin, the ball is released and a timer starts counting. When the time is up, the middle line of the playfield will rise a bit, closer to the top glass. After that, when the ball is shot from one side of the playfield towards the other, it will get stuck on the middle line. When inserting another coin, the score counters will reset to 0, and the ball will again be released. You control the game with a shoe connected to a gun. You can rotate the gun to move the shoe about 90 degrees (45 to each direction from the straight forward angle). When pulling the trigger, the shoe gives a quite rapid kick. Enough to make the ball rolling to the opponent’s side, and hopefully hit the switch at the bottom of the goal cage.

I will definitively try to make this completely operational. It looks like it is supposed to have table legs, like a cocktail cabinet. This game would be a very nice piece of furniture, especially in working condition.

One funny thing is that I cannot find anything about this game on the Internet. Do you know anything about it, or can point me to some web page with relevant information? I’d like to know when it was manufactured, how many units were out there, how many units is possibly left today, information about other similar games, etc. All kind of information would be valuable. Thank you, Maetz, for giving me this nice object of geek culture!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 20th, 2006 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Arcade, Work In Progress, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.