Pinball life still has many Alien parts for sell. Only certain ones sold out (which makes sense considering their limited stock).

Ice, I hope you are right as I'd love to own Alien again without dropping 15k+, but I suspect at the end of the day it won't happen because (a) there isn't enough seed $$ to push it through and (b) no manufacturing facility willing to run it.

I remember having a thread on this year's ago...Think the $$$ was around 39k ( including my $1500) that pinsiders were owed for deposits. No idea what manufacturers, workers etc. # really was.

The only thing that could make my machine better would be knowing that somehow everyone was made whole ( or close, anyway).

Only way that would be possible is if a new run/version of Alien was made, with a company that cared of such things. For that reason, I really hope Doug's ( not Chris's, btw) info is correct.

Hoping? Yes....Think it happens? I have no idea... probably a long shot...

Fair enough. I’ve got no idea...just talking sh*t because it’s fun and I’m hoping they get it made.

I hear you! Just adding in some more color. It's such a crazy idea though to retrofit a rare game into another form of pinball. Not just bringing back alien but almost in a different form? This industry is crazy and yes a lot of money would be made but so much more goes into this. I'm curious if they would really be required legally to pay for those that sent money but never received anything.

Does anyone know of a good gameplay video? I watched the SDTM assisted unboxing finally the other night, and gameplay there felt a bit clunky.

Also, are the assets used as/even more trimmed than POTC? I'd read Sigourney was a no go, but I didn't see much else, heard some familiar voices though....

The game is full of video from both movies. It just doesn't use sigourney.

Game play will look clunky from people who are new to the game because of the non-traditional geometry.

Don’t understand why people think it would be crazy or uneconomical to retool this game to a different format. The game is already designed. Playfield layout, artwork, code map, video and sound already done. In other words, half the R&D is already there. This is a huge head start compared to starting a whole new game. Plus most of us that have played think it’s a really good game. It’s a popular IP/theme.

Our initial parts shipment from Pinball Brothers was small. We did not (and honestly still don't) know how much demand there is for these parts.

We have more parts on order, but at this time I do not have a confirmation as to how long it will take to get them in or what parts are still available.

Terry.

Who does Pinball Brothers owe what to?

They aren’t Andrew Crapway.

I feel like they made things as right as possible like sending games to Aurich, David etc

If we are talking about my deposit years ago that ship sailed long ago

https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2018/05/10/heighway-pinball-by-the-numbers/

They owed about 2M pounds when they liquidated the company. The consumers that made deposits were a very small portion of that number.

Heighway owed that money, not the pinball brothers current company.. The IP assets, parts, tooling, etc. that were owned by Heighway were “sold” to a new company owned by the Pinball Brothers prior to Heighway filing for bankruptcy. The remaining assets were liquidated, and creditors were paid whatever was left, which wasn’t much. The new pinball brothers company cannot and will not be held liable for any debts previously owed by Heighway.

Glean from this what you will.. but pinball brothers is still making changes to their owner/directors even as recently as of a few days ago.

CD8FE2D8-8806-4A51-B3CF-707FA0F73B30 (resized).png

So instead of doing the right thing (delivering games to paid in full customers and refunding deposits) they sold all of assets to their own company. Then they sold all of the completed games to new money customers and ran into bankruptcy.
They did everything right for themselves and nothing for the customers who paid for a game they never got.

Hard to see it any other way. If Alien shows up again under PB, its r&d was absolutely funded in part by the deposits that never got a game.

When you look at the alien design and BW design it doesn't look so easy to me, either the playfield spots might need moving or the brackets changing, or playfield redesigning.

It runs on a PC board that's the only thing that the same. It would need changing to work with CGC's beagle board and I/O system, not an impossible task I agree. It's not just ./Configure; Make && make install!

Its just not how CGC have made other games.

I'm not saying someone else couldn't make it, I just don't see it being CGC.

But as I noted before Pinball brothers have a lot of folks to put right and they will goto jail if it turns out they hid/didn't declare valuable assets from the bankruptcy process!

Regards,
Neil.

its called fraud and in the UK carries a 5 year jail sentance.

Is there any indication Heighway hid assets in the bankruptcy? I didn’t follow closely but I thought the deal was that PB bought assets out of the Heighway bankruptcy, so that PB wouldn’t have any legal obligations to Heighway’s other creditors (like the preorder folks) unless they failed to follow UK bankruptcy rules in some way.

It's not clear in my view but I don't understand how those assets wouldn't have been valued enough to pay all the pre-order folks their money back.

Because there was a lot of money owed to a lot of other debtors besides the pre order crowd. Substantially more from what I read. So the money went towards that debt.

To my knowledge pinball brothers doesn’t have to pay any debtors or pre order buyers.

Would be a really cool thing but I am not sure it would be in the best interest of CGC. I think right now 90's titles are hot and they should strike while they will have the least resistance sales wise. Yes Alien would sell well and I would love to see it made more reliably. I just don't think the numbers will add up to the same margins as TOTAN, CC, TOM, CV, BBB and some others.

Now if you said there were 250 @ 12.5k then I could see how they could contract manufacture and make it all work.

I think somebody should just buy the license or theme and start over. Hint hint Stern.

Are you a debtor? If not I don't know how you would know that. The pinball brothers company probably has no liability, but the individual directors for sure have, and their actions in transferring the assets will be critical.

Regards,
Neil.

The beagle board would not have enough CPU and video memory to run this design. It would never work.

https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2018/05/10/heighway-pinball-by-the-numbers/

I can't imagine how pin bros are anywhere near the black at this point. my perspective; they're probably following plan b or c to hopefully salvage huge losses. Sure seemed like they tried to make it work as a Heighway game, now hopefully it's made in decent numbers as a pinbro or cgc game.

Hard to prove what assets were bought by pinball brothers prior to bankruptcy, vs pulled out of Heighway..

One things that’s interesting to me, is Andrew Heighway, one of the pinball brothers Daniel Janson (free-play.se) who is selling this alien parts, and pinball brothers themselves are all listed as creditors on the Heighway bankruptcy...

It’s been nearly a year... and no one has gone after them or challenged the liquidation even tho clearly they have assets and revenues. It sure looks like it’s in the rear view mirror to me....

I’d say that’s some pretty ridiculous speculation

You don’t hear anybody whining or suing about not getting paid

The previous fraud is 100% on Andrew

Let’s let the facts come out. The full release of the Mueller report I mean Alien project will be released soon!

Wait, we can’t have the facts and common sense get in the way of a rush to indict!

Wait, what's the exact bet? I very much like free booze and I'm local so I can collect...

Alien's electronics were very over-built. They used MCUs on their node boards that were about 4x more powerful (ahem expensive) than they needed to be. On top of this they did noob stuff like use an expensive FTDI232 converter IC even though the MCUs had built in USB support. I know this because it's the same noob stuff I did early on.

Also yes, a BBB would probably struggle with HD LCD video assets.

You name it........

Ass tattoo.

Does CGC uses LCD display or dot matrix?
I wonder if their 256 x 64 dots is a dmd as well

It’s all LCD.

Oh ok. Dmd cost much more and more complex to use so I got why

What's the point to display custom dots on a lcd?
Funny isn’t it.
You could have redraw everything in HD cartoon like things.
Anyway I like the result, just saying...

I played the Special Edition Monster Bash at Texas a lot last weekend. The double sized display and updated “dots” are so much better than the original. I’m not typically a fancy buyer, but the SE MBr would be my choice over the classic edition MBr.

Until I see a post from Aurich I don’t believe anything.

I do agree it looks a lot better and the pin looks great and I understand its success for sure.
Only thing is, I could be a purist or else, but it feels strange to have dots display without a dmd diplay. It feels like an emulation to me.

At the end the result is great but the dot came from a constraint on the display : at the time they were able to make great animations with such tiny resolution it was something.
I would have prefered a real dmd but I'm maybe the only one who cares

To go back to the subject, I think it's doubtfull indeed there is enough power to run HD anims.

All of their games use an emulation. They use a version of pinmame and the original rom code and some sort of mapping for the new higher detailed colored assets.

Ok thanks for the infos and the details.
Again it was the easy road.
New animations looks great again, i’d have been curious see the difference with a real dmd with those to compare the quality and feeling.

Here you go (from last week):

CGC's updated dots are amazing looking.

I honestly have nothing to tell you. I don't talk to the Pinball Bros people, I'm not involved in anything. If they're remaking the game it's news to me. If they want to pay me my royalty on the games that were made that I never saw and continue it for new ones I'm game. This is me not holding my breath.

But I have no interest in being involved in the speculation, what happens or not is whatever to me really.

I chose not to sell my LE for $17k for a variety of reasons. One is I paid $10k for it and didn’t want to take advantage of anybody.

Despite beating down the value of my game significantly, I’m happy that this great pin is getting remade so others who want one can enjoy it.

Almost as good as AP's LCD you've wanted to say...

Someone give this man a podcast!

He pretty much has one...he speaks through Kaneda apparently.

Yeah this unholy alliance is bound to work out for both of them.