This toy was originally released in 1972. Matchbox was the toy company that made it, and Cascade was the name of the game.
It was described as the “Super – Action Thump – A – Drum Game That’s Fun For All the Family” and the “Baffling Bouncing Ball Game.”
Basically ball bearings dropped from the launching ramp at the top of the tower, and if you were lucky and everything was set up correctly, they would bounce from one drum to the next, until they landed in the collecting tray. There were slots on the collecting tray with different scores, and when everything was working correctly, the balls would then roll back along the plastic track, returning to the base of the tower. There was a battery and a motor in the tower, and then you switched this on, the ball bearings moved up the tower in a large plastic spiral, and were stored at the top, ready for launching. A plastic rod stopped them at the top, and when you slid this down out of the way, all the ball bearings would roll out and start bouncing off the drums, towards the collecting tray.
One interesting variable is that if you launched a single ball, it would bounce off the three drums in a certain direction. But when you launched a lot of balls, they would often land on a drum that was already moving from the previous ball, and so the subsequent ball would not bounce in the same way.
