Kongman ; Ball Bearing Week Day 7 

I can complete share that fascination with Kongman, it was the first of these games that I ever got and to see it all moving and working...it was magical. I used to have a couple of the pocketeers, long since been donated to charity unfortunately, but they were all great little games, especially the wind up ones. I have a couple of the Tomy Tricky Towers ball bearing games too but they're not motorised and although fun to play with, not that great to look at on film ;)

sar Gray you can get them on eBay but it’s hard to find one with all the pieces still, might need to buy 2 to get all the pieces. I’ve got another I’ve used for spares over the years, repairing the motor etc.

Really don't make toys like this any more sadly

Yeah I'm aware of Avago, I get the feeling that it's what inspired a lot of Tomy's pocket ball bearing mazes. I like those kind of mazes, very simple but still a challenge

it impresses me that all this mechanical engineering went into creating a toy, truly is astonishing when you think about it. I'm a massive fan of Transformers for the reason, all those tiny pieces, all that work and design to make a toy (Takara who make transformers are part of Tomy BTW) Tomy did and still make some really fantastic toys. I'm gonna guess it was probably one of the Epoch games, Epoch made a bunch of obstacle/labyrinth style games for the launch of the N64 so it's possible it could be one of those. There's a brilliant japanese youtube channel that looks at all the ball bearing games i can't get over here and have no clue about getting, it's this one here ru-vid.comvideos

@@downfromtheattic Thanks, he has some interesting stuff! I never realized so many variants existed of what I always called snafu. Is there any repository of information of all these types of sets somewhere, like a wiki or something? Also love your steam engines, have several myself. Have you ever looked into old electromechanical arcade machines before video arcade machines became big? They are very similar in spirit to many of these types of things and use all sorts of interesting mechanical magic and visual trickery to work.

@@randomguy9898 Yeah there's a ton of them, lot of Japanese variations and some pretty fantastic new versions of ball bearing games too. The mechanical ones are the ones I find most fascinating. unfortunately I've not found a page or list of ball bearing games and if I did, my wallet would be a lot lighter for it :D Ah cool, I'd love to get some more Wilesco steam engines and possibly some vintage Bing engines but they go for a lot of money these days. Yes and I find them absolutely amazing, saw a video a while back on this old Sega game called Combat. Incredible that they were able to accomplish all that with models, forced perspective and clever lighting. I'm fortunate to live 20 mins drive away from Europe's biggest vintage arcade and I've seen they have a couple of these they're restoring. They have an excellent game there called Ice Cold Beer by Taito, have to navigate this ball bearing up a board full of holes, its balanced on this rod you control. Really simple game but it takes ages to master :D

@@downfromtheattic Thats great! I wish I had more stuff close to me, theres a nice pinball museum that is about an hour away that has a couple old arcade types of some very unique and weird design. I have seen videos of those machines before, thats super neat! My personal favorite is Atari's "F1" Yeah, I wish the market was a bit cheaper for those engines, I personally love the old bing, doll, and marklin engines though its mostly above my budget!

@@randomguy9898 it's an incredible place, it's called Arcade Club. £15 to get in and all the games are free to play, stay as long as you want, I've lost hours in there :D yeah the 60-70s pre video game machines are really something else, so clever. I think a lot of the Tomy games use similar mechanics like the Tomy Racing Turbo definitely does. My engine collection isn't all the engines my Grandad had, he had some really old ones, had a 125 year old traction engine toy. Never fired it up but we used compressed air to fill the boiler and that thing still flew around the living room. Amazing to see toys that old still functional.

Maybe… 😉

Donkey Kong in itself borrows from King Kong, big ape climbs a large structure with a girl as his captive. I guess both Donkey Kong and Kongman both borrow the idea from there.