The original photo is here is a pale imitation. The OG you're looking for is The Rollercoaster by Anatex Enterprises (of Los Angeles, CA).
Five unique, color differentiated wires of balls out, rail-riding, gravity-driven wooden bead mayhem. Though the blue wire barely counts. Its banal path is curt and uninspired; clearly an afterthought in both design and execution. F-tier. Green and orange make the entire experience worth it though.
I remember being 13 years old in the doctor’s waiting room feeling awkward for wanting to play with it as I thumbed through a boring, 11 year old Reader’s Digest.
Hot take: they intentionally put these in Grown Up places that have a lot of kids so their filthy curious hands only fuck with the shiny blocks, and not with the TV remotes and the fax machines
Hell, I made them. When I was a teenager I worked at a company called Educo that made these. The machines the old guy invented that bent the wires up were crazy.
this is part of the orientation sequence when you first get loaded into the matrix to fine tune your virtual nervous system, the code was simple effective and free so pretty much every simulator used it.