The Addams Family by Barcrest: A Look at the £25 Fruit Machine

The Addams Family carries its theme across the whole cabinet. The family portraits stretch over the title, lightning cuts across the dark glass, and the feature panels form a crooked house between the cash and nudge ladders. This is the Barcrest fruit machine, rather than the pinball table with the same name.

The example in our photograph has a £25 jackpot marked at the top left. Its cash ladder rises along that side, while the nudge ladder runs down the right. Between them, the house gives each feature its own window instead of presenting everything as a plain list.

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Names such as Morticia’s Multiplier, Go Gomez Go and You Rang tie the features to the characters. There is also a numbered Hi-Lo display beneath the house, above the exchange position. Together these details make the upper glass much more than a decorative backdrop.

The lower panel holds three reels and a separate numbered movement grid to their right. That grid is an important part of recognising this version: it gives the machine a different layout from an Addams-themed game built around a simple trail.

The cabinet is worth looking at for the way Barcrest fitted the television-and-film family into a traditional fruit-machine layout. The £25 marking identifies the photographed setup; it should not be used to infer a release year or assume that every version has identical awards.