Well, I'll add one more to the list: The Magnificent Marble Machine!
I only got to see a few episodes of it on Cincinnati's WXIX-TV during the summer of 1975, but emcee Art James would tell the game's players that \"you have to earn your marbles\" before they would play the show's front-game -- which, in fact, had nothing at all to do with pinball!
Instead, the players had to guess words from crossword puzzle-type clues (similar to those that would be later used on NBC's Scrabble, and the first team to correctly guess five words from their corresponding clues got to play the show's giant pinball machine for all the prizes. (And, on the few episodes of that show I got to see, they only got two balls per game unless they managed to top the game's preset \"Goal Score\" that earned them the third \"Golden Money Ball!\"
Actually, there were a number of versions of the end game on TMMM, all of which involved playing the machine. (These are the ones I can think of; it's possible that I may have missed one or two.) In all of them, you only got two balls (not including the money ball, if any); also, after 60 seconds on each ball, the flippers stopped working.
First, the goal started at 15,000, and went down 1000 each time it was not hit. Later, the start value was 13,000. Next came the \"Money Ball Marathon\", where the high scorer from every seven games played the Money Ball (the one time I saw the money ball played in this version, there was a 3-way tie, so all three played a Money Ball, with the high score getting the money).
After that, the money ball and the points were removed; instead, the player won a larger prize (either a car or an around-the-world trip) for lighting all seven bumpers. Finally, the large prize was removed as well, and the object was just to win the prizes associated with each bumper.
As for end games having little or nothing to do with their main games, how about the end game to the NBC version of Chain Reaction, which ended up being the main game on GO! ?
-- Don (the poster formerly known as \"Helgaforce\")