It was all quiet on the Pinball Brothers front since the demise of the Heighway Pinball venture a few years ago.
Just like the rise of the phoenix (Ed: or should that be Xenomorph?), so have the Pinball Brothers ! Towards the end of 2020, we noticed that Pinball Brothers (PB) had quietly setup their online presence with a website and social media channels, which immediately piqued our interest and set off our motion tracker.
With nothing much to glean in the way of pinball news or information from their site initially, we kept a close eye on their cryptic social media posts, which were intriguing to say the least. With every tweet, Facebook and Instagram post, we were glued to our social timeline, trying to piece together their cryptic clues. Surely all of this was pointing to the resurrection of the Alien pinball machine.
Well, on December 18, 2020, all was answered of course when the Pinball Brothers team appeared on The Super Awesome Pinball Show (TSAPS podcast) – announcing that the coveted Alien pinball machine was going to be relaunched! For those that do not know the history of Alien pinball or Pinball Brothers’ involvement in the failed Heighway Pinball saga, we’ll spare you the sordid details here, as there are plenty of posts on forums and other pinball news sites that have documented their past quite well (Ed: Google is your friend!).
We first played the Heighway Pinball ALIEN machine at FlipOut 2018 – the theme integration was off the charts!
From their interview on TSAPS, the good news was that they were working on bringing back an Alien Standard Version (SV) first, followed by a Limited Version (LV) towards the middle of 2021. Even better news was that they were not going to take pre-order money this time, meaning that if you want one of their new Alien pinball machines, you would have to go via one of PB’s approved distributors (for those in Australia, the local distributor is Mr. Pinball Australia). As you could imagine, distributors were immediately inundated with pinballers clamouring to get on the list for an Alien Standard Version – the Limited Version order banks have not yet opened. Interestingly, PB did not disclose any more details about the features on the Limited Version of the machine, which has left folks speculating of what will (or won’t) appear on the high-end machine.
This Alien pinball remake has had a number of tweaks that distinguish it from the original Heighway Pinball version, including a standard backbox, wide-body Bally Williams style cabinet, removal of the LCD on the playfield above the flippers and a physical ball lock to name just a few. PB mentioned that they had also spent these last two years working under the hood to ensure that this new Alien pinball experience would be durable and reliable, something that the original was not (without a lot of tinkering and TLC).
Heighway Pinball’s ALIEN (left) and PB’s ALIEN remake (right)
With their almost indestructible playfields being produced in Germany by Buthamburg, the build and manufacturing of the machines will be in Italy, by Pedretti Gaming, who produce pinball replacement parts and sell used pinball machines. 2021 just got interesting, and rest assured, we’ll be keeping a close eye on this Xenomorphic pinball venture!
For now, it’s not GAME OVER for Alien pinball!
For more information on Alien, please visit the Pinball Brothers website.
PS: We will update this post once there is video footage of this machine being played!
image source: Pinball Brothers
