Well, I'm intrigued...

Luke

Wow, great theme! I'd love for some of these botique manufacturers to get some of these machines they are designing to market; would be awesome for pinball. Would love to see another non-American company spring up as well (yes, I know Nemo is not American and I think that is great).

Also, huge plus one for a theme catering to adults and not children. Pinball really could use more themes targeting an older crowd. Kudos to the Brits if they pull this off.

wow interesting news, thanks for posting.

Ok I'll ask, why does the girl have 2 right feet?

circe18.jpg

"Verrry Eenteresting!"

Arte1.jpg

Good eye.....

Or she was cursed??

Cool theme and nice place for the LCD screen. Great time for pinball.

I love all these new companies out there now. Its too bad the machines will always be too expensive for me to own unless I win the lottery. I just wish I could find some decent older games to buy while I still have a few bucks in my pocket. 8-(

more good news for pinball. thanks for sharing this.

Just fantastic to hear!!!

I love the theme, and it's perfect for routing (pubs). Wonder if any places in america will import this? Can't wait to see a working whitewood.

Funny how the market works.. prices go up, companies will form. It's like if gas ever went up to $8/gallon, suddenly we'd have hydrogen or electric vehicles we can afford.

Anyone ever shipped from the UK before? This looks really interesting.

Damnit, I should've gone to The Pipeline tonight. I want one of those flyers. Table looks very nice but it's one thing to design a table and another to manufacture one. No indication yet of how many will be made but if that backbox is removable I may well grab one down the line depending on price.

LOL...that's an epic art fail. You can tell where they spent most of the time on that character design!

Interesting ramp and insert positioning.

It seems like the big challenge for the boutique guys is in the software and electronics . . . they get the mechanics and designs, the white boards seems to be easy for them. But can they manufactur chips and PCB boards in a cost effective manner?

She has feet?

The Circe artwork is very good, but the titling could use a little help from a graphic designer. Is it just me, or does Circe have "Disney princess" eyes? No matter, she looks great - nice gams!

I'd love to see a resurgence in Mythology-themed pins. Bacchus would be a good one for the pubs.

It is a challenge for sure, but in this particular case its all been figured out already pretty much by the people behind it, its a business afterall (This isnt so much a 'boutique' setup, its looking to be a mainline pinball supplier with a reasonably substantial factory etc.. plus these are not being produced solely for the home market, theyll be targeting ops in a big way..), and as such has investors and the like putting up capital so everythings had to be costed in order to produce a business plan with relevant financial projections etc..
No-one would have stumped up money without an idea of how much the things will cost to produce, quite a lot of works gone into this already to be fair.

Im sure Andy (The owner of heighway pinball) will post on here soon enough and answer peoples questions, but i can tell you theres some REAL interesting aspects to this project that will genuinely set it apart from the other pinball producers.

Love that it's adult themed.

Curses! After spending a very enjoyable afternoon at the "Pinball at the Pipeline" event, I must have left just before Andy made this announcement.

I'm looking forward to seeing the prototype at the UK Pinball Party next month. Andy Heighway is a great guy, and has done a lot for the UK pinball scene recently, including supplying most of the games for the "Pinball at the Pipeline" event. I wish him well with his latest project.

Best time in a long time in pinball.

Wow, I noticed that too! If they don't look at this details on their logo, what can you expect from this company...

Tiny details matter, but I suppose two right flippers will be fine.....

Another mass produced pin that is geared up for location use. Pretty big news.

Interesting concept of putting the lcd on the playfield like Capt. Nemo. Don't know where JPOP is putting his, but that seems to be a new trend.

Not relying on a license, they can incorporate what they want without having to check if it is okay. Adds a little more creativity.

Wish them luck and think it is cool as there are more options out there.

Doesn't bother me in the slightest. Just a graphic designer they hired (probably a family member of one of the principals) made a small goof. I doubt that graphic designer is doing the commercial grade stuff for their roll out.

This is the best news I've heard in a long long time. England is a great place to roll out ya'lls model too. Your pub scene in London and Portsmouth (only places in Englad I've been) are perfect for pinball; far better than the bar scene anywhere in the US I've been.

If you guys can gain traction and make machines that are easy to work on and repair while at the same time being affordable . . . you could revive the operator market in a lot of places. I sure wish you guys luck and can't wait to follow this project's development!

What is going on? This is like a tornado of pinball makers, is that 6 now? I can't buy 6 pins a year, I have no room! Choices will have to be made...CURSES

Welcome to the party guys. Will you be the first to have a commercially produced pinball machine with an lcd integrated into the playfield? If so, massive kudos to you. It's been available long enough! Finally...

And at least two of them are going with an adult theme (these guys and Predator; not enough known about BHZA, but the safe bet is it will be PG or PG13). Bravo for selecting an adult pin theme . . . so needed.

The in playfield color LCD could be a game changer. Even if it's not ball sensing. The fact that the monitor is at eye level where you're actually playing rather than in the backbox out of sight makes all the difference.

This is a cool idea. Great time for pinball. Maybe some will actually show up on location around here.

I think this is big as well; but I think the biggest game changer is when the glass that IGT, WMS and Bally's (yes, those two entities) are using for their current slot machines makes its way into pinball. Glass that can display video . . . sure, it isn't LCD quality video but when your play field glass can display things . . . wow.

Go see what the current slot machines are doing; it is some cool stuff.

Sorry; don't want to hijack this thread; this machine sounds like it could be a huge hit and really help pinball. I wish the Brits the best of luck and love the theme!

I don't know why you qualify this . I am not saying it will make all before obsolete by any stretch. New is good! New is fun! I will still love playing Whirlwind no matter what happens after all. But someone will implement this correctly even if it is not the first guys. It might be the first guys though, ya never know. I personally cannot wait to see this working and playing. Now how long will that be lol?

That would be cool!

I was in vegas about a month ago, it IS some amazing stuff. Lots of transparent LCD's that you don't even realize are there. Especially the fish ones, you'll be playing the slot, and it's the normal opaque LCD rolling the reels, then all of the sudden fish start swimming by out of nowhere in a front layer.

Not saying pinball needs to do this (a regular playfield LCD would be leaps and bounds better than what we have now), but it's technology like this that will hopefully push things along. Imagine one day having a top glass that's really a transparent LCD that displays animations on top?

Congratulations to Andy for announcing this news tonight. Hope he does well and the game becomes a huge success!

I want one.

I also refuse to participate in the preorder shenanigans so hopefully this company does well enough to have inventory.

Great to see more people trying to get into making machines it adds some much needed diversity like pins made with adult themes.

I started looking at the website for that pinball. Everything looked good.......until I saw that they put a god damned video monitor in the playfield. Instant turn off for me. I will pass this one by.

That's the beauty of it... Having to choose, calculating risk, cost, appeal, originality... Best period indeed.

Can't wait to hit the prototype on this. I really hope more people get on the bandwagon of building their first games. We need a new group of designers, competition and variety can only be good.

Good luck to Andy and his team, they have my fully vocal support

This is fantastic, and might be my chance for a NIB.
I wonder who is on the "team", I wonder if John Trudeau is in??

Calculating the risk is the scary part actually. Those that bet on Kingpin or remakes of MM or CC seem to have lost their bets; though most claim to have received a return of their money. Predator is zero risk as there are no deposits but some worry they will lack the money necissary to make their chips and PCB boards (which, funny enough, was the exact problem that appears to have totally ended the Kingpin project).

I'm pumped about this project though. These Animal House guys answered most of my questions when they said they had professional lenders providing the capital. We need to pick a name for this project. CAH seems to make the most sense?

For circuit boards I'm starting to wonder if it's time for people to start thinking about just throwing low performance PCs in them (you can go with fanless heatsinks then) with solid state storage and a Linux OS. Then even in the future when that exact motherboard doesn't exist anymore - you'll be able to find something else that'll run it just fine. $35 motherboard sounds very tempting compared to $150 Stern CPU board (guessing at the price).

I have finite space for machines, this news will force decisions I'm not looking forward to making, but oh well... I'm interested in Predator, Nemo and now this. Something's simply not going to get bought in the end, quite aside from the money issues!

Anyone else worried about what's going to happen with hazing of the giant window you need in front of under-playfield LCDs? Mylar time..

I wondered about that too, partly because I run an IT recycling company and so have access to ridiculous quantities of mid to low-end pc's that we basically destroy for the scrap value of their pcb (Precious metals content is quite high on these) so I know these can be sourced for a few pounds each - I think it was something that was talked about but they went down another road in the end (Tekky reasons i assume - unless you really reinvented the technology that makes a pinball machine 'tick' i cant see how you could avoid some sort of power/driver board etc.. by which point you might just as well create your own proprietary full boardset ).

I cant exactly remember off the top of my head but didnt the new canasta people use a pc system board of some sort?

Best post by anyone all weekend right here.

Last I heard both JPop and Predator were using P-ROC boards where the game logic is all run from a regular computer over USB and the instant response stuff like switch reading and flipper triggers happen on the P-ROC. Works like a charm.

The problem is anytime you build more software you have other things to glitch and Crash.. Such as we saw on the linux based WOZ machine at E3 show. Running a propitiatory cpu board and software system allows everything to be purpose built rather then build around the confines of an OS.

Looks cool though.. Heres food for thought since Stern builds overseas first, does that mean these guys will build ours first? =)

Will be really interesting to see how the LCD is integrated with gameplay - guess we find out in August.

Uhh, the issues you saw at E3 were all hardware. The software running never crashed at all. The worst thing is I had to restart the software because I hadn't gotten to better crashed-io-board recovery yet. In general I couldn't be happier with how the software performed.