We created a prototype of a head-to-head machine with two full size playfield. The theme is good vs evil. We brought the machine to the Dutch Pinball last year and Jack Danger did a cool stream:

A lot of people enjoyed playing it (at least our impression). The game is fully playable without major problems such as ball traps or missing modes. Obviously there is a lot which can be polished and we are working on that. Also we will probably redo/overhaul the artwork when doing a final playfield revision. However, we now reached a point where we are wondering if this should stay a one-off or if we should build a few machines. Is there interest for such a machine? We would probably build like 10 machines.

Major downside: It is huge (220cm or 7.25 feet) and will be expensive (at least the price of two machines obviously). On the upside the concept is unique. Even older head-to-head machine such as Joust have a different type of rules. In Joust it is about keeping the ball on your side to get the maximum score. In this machine it is about keeping your lives by not loosing any balls and at the same time shooting balls to the other player so that he looses balls quicker. Last man standing wins.

Most stuff is already in CAD and we also produced most parts at commercial manufacturers. So this could be produced. The build progress is documented in a German forum: https://www.flippermarkt.de/community/forum/threads/head2head-pinball-im-eigenbau-good-vs-evil.160338/ and also slightly on Pinside: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/head2head-custom-pinball-machine-good-vs-evil.

What would have to change for a small run?
- New artwork
- Professional printed playfield (current prototype is a decal) at Mirco (current playfield is also by Mirco)
- Laser all plastics (currently 3D printed)
- Some more sounds/call outs
- DMD animations
- Laser a new revision of all ramps and rails (mostly minor changes such as adding more tabs for plastics)
- Change from 80V to 48V PSU for easier certification
- FCC/CE certification

What do you think? Price would probably be in the range of $25k to $30k (because of small quantity).

Here is a picture of the machine in action

IMG_20181110_171126.jpg

We thought about this. However, pinball is about actually shooting physical balls. It would not be the same. Similar to virtual pinball. It similar but not the same.

You can actually play our machine as a single player. The other side will just do nothing and you are playing against yourself/score. That part of the software is not very advanced though.

If you want networked play then the P3 might be what you want. We like the fact that the ball physically moves to the other side which is why we built our machine. Ball transfers are very transparent and intuitive to the players. Kids understand it during the first game. We had kids around the machine all day at DPO.

100 is already much more than we could realistically build. More like 10-30.

We don't want to make a commercial product at any cost. So if there is no interest in a "real" physical head2head game I'm fine with that. Makeing a few machine would be more to prove that we can do it and not to make money out of this (but also not at a loss). If you designed a game for four years with two guys you probably will never even break even if you consider your work.

That would certainly work. However, from a homebrew (or probably even small MFG) standpoint you would have to reinvent too many things. We choose a full size standard width playfield because all the parts are readily available for those. We still had to build the cabinet and backbox which required a decent amount of changes. If we also had redesigned hindges, armour, legs, glass guides and so on we would not have finished the machine by now. Maybe in a few more years. A pinball machine consists of a large number of parts. Individually those are relatively easy to manufacture/build but you cannot simply redesign them all. That would require a lot resources and even with sufficient funding/people those project usually fail because of complexity/dependencies.