1976 Williams SPACE ODYSSEY (Space Mission) pinball machine

Here's a 1976 Williams Space Odyssey pinball machine in action. This is the two-player version of the more common four-player Space Mission.

Williams sold a TON of Space Mission/Odyssey machines and this game seems to be very popular. It has a fairly novel swinging target in the centre of the playfield, but this feature was used on several games in the 60's and 70's - pretty much exclusively by Williams - on games like Heat Wave (which had two) and Swinger.

The unusual lower playfield layout meant that ball control is a bit more difficult to maintain than on a "normal" machine. There are kick-out holes just to the outside of the flippers so if the player tries to cradle the ball on the flipper, it will fall into the hole and get kicked back onto the playfield. This could be manipulated, if timed correctly, to hit the swinging target and rebound into the opposing side's kick-out hole. This pattern could be repeated over and over with little risk of losing the ball and the player could rack up points (and free games) without too much skill or effort.

The spinner shot on the left is fairly fun to shoot for and the game plays quite quickly if it's set-up properly and the flippers are well maintained. It's not an overly "fun" game, but it's not a terrible one, either.

Space Odyssey/Mission was designed by Steve Kordek with artwork by Christian Marche. More info on this game (and it's four-player brother) can be found here:
http://ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2254
http://ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2253