At the beginning of the 2010s, various companies were joining the pinball fray to challenge Stern’s dominance. One of those was the UK-based Heighway Pinball. They built and sold an original theme called Full Throttle first, then in 2014, they announced their first licensed title, Alien. Unfortunately, the realities of operating a pinball-company eventually took their toll on the business, and long story very short, Heighway Pinball failed. That wasn’t before they did manage to get some Alien units out the door, but many pre-order investors were left out in the cold; I’ve also heard plenty of talk about the earliest production Alien machines having a plethora of tech issues.
As a part of the “saga” here, a group called Pinball Brothers (click here for more info on their involvement with Heighway and Alien in the past) today announced a remake of the machine so that those who have been interested in it will finally have a chance to grab one. Here’s the flyer:
As you can see in comparing the two pics (to be fair, the top one showing the original design is of the slightly enhanced LE model), the backbox is a significant change from the original, swapping Heighway’s rounded design with something a little more traditional (minus the speaker grill of course. They also no longer have the LCD on the playfield above the flippers, just keeping it in the backbox. While I personally liked and preferred it there, it’s understandable to just go with 1 to save on costs.
Here are the two flyers to compare changes (new on the left, old on the right). The playfield art has been changed to accommodate the removal of the LCD, and the side rails have also been worked on/changed to deal with some issues encountered with the original. Overall, it looks like the experience will be almost the same…hopefully, a little better in terms of fixing some issues that the original design had.
At the moment, there are several distributors taking orders for the game, with the standard model MSRPing at $7777+freight, and the LE coming in at $9999+freight. The Pinball Bros. have also come up with a solution for those who pre-ordered and paid for the product, but never got their machine, so kudos to them on that.
What do you think about this – if you have the means would you want to get one? Put it on location perhaps, or just collect?
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