As the webmaster of a video game website, I tend to get a variety of real-life mail related to the site, but most of it is incredibly boring: server bills, webhosting quarterlies, boring books of documentation. However, once in a very rare while I will receive something so incredibly amazing my sheer joy can’t be held back. So wonderful that I feel I must tell the entire Internet. And today, my friends, I received something just that wonderful.

(Click for full size)

The Sega Boozometer is a bar game to “test sobriety”–the player inserts a nickel and attempts to move a ring on a handle along a curved rail without the ring actually touching the rail. If the player succeeds, they get their nickel back. It’s a simple enough game, but it doesn’t appear to have been a popular one–in all the research I have done online and off (including quite a few snoozefests of old books and magazines), I have never come across this machine before now. I’d probably place the machine as having been manufactured somewhere in the mid-60s, possibly as late as 1969-70, though I would think the vaguely racist drawing in the top-left corner would have been removed if it were later than that. Bear in mind that such illustrations were par for the course for the industry back then (Seeburg in particular had some very offensive stuff in the 40s), so this is no cause to run around and call Sega racist.

In any case, it’s a neat bit of Sega history that had been forgotten before now; if on the off-chance you own one of these machines (or do a Google search and find this page years later), contact this site, as I’m eager for actual photos of the machine. Until then, I’m definitely framing this ad and keeping it above my liquor cabinet.