Hey Pinside! Im excited to share “Philina”— a custom retheme I recently finished for my wedding! This project took nearly two years start to finish.
For a game that would premiere at our wedding, the theme obviously had to prominently feature my wife and I. But I wanted to go beyond a cheesy love story and make it feel more pinball appropriate. I settled on sort of a mad max/robot apocalypse theme. There is a random assortment of robot baddies, cybernetic cats, and natural disasters peppered throughout the game. It’s sort of a cosmic gumbo. It doesn’t really make sense, much like a lot of pinball themes, and I love it for that. Our home city of Houston, as well as our pets and personally relevant landmarks are peppered throughout the game, albeit through a post-apocalyptic filter.
The game is rethemed from a Gorgar if it isn’t obvious. Before you cry over the loss of a Gorgar, rest easy knowing that it was an absolute disaster when I purchased it. I really didn’t feel too bad destroying it completely. It ended up being a pretty good game for a retheme, because that era of Williams made it easy to switch the sounds from the demonic Gorgar sounds to more generic “musical notes”. I did my best to honor that era of pinball, and resolved to try and make a game that looked like it could have been released in 1979.
The title “Philina” is a combination of our names, Phil and Alina. I usually scoff at these couple names, but “Philina” felt like a would be right at home in a lineup of games from the 70’s/80’s.
I worked with several artists on this project: sketch_hubner, pandora_svnr, and Blake Dumesnil.
I’ll flip the usual order of these types of posts and start with the finished product, then I’ll follow up with posts on how I created specific components. I came up with several novel approaches that I hope homebrewers/restorers will find useful. Enjoy!
1F777885-C1B8-4763-8E9C-E4DCCA3DB5C8 (resized).jpeg9DA41841-562B-47B0-9F01-B07923222C79 (resized).jpeg5A394FFF-779D-47AC-A8D4-A7FAADB13672 (resized).jpeg2EE6AA28-8EFD-4A65-A129-41A1DA2232BE (resized).jpeg76A4C7BE-6F29-41E9-80B8-1AEDE18A82FC (resized).jpegAED5DE20-AB28-486E-A6A3-D9E0B98F570D (resized).jpeg01E1230E-9C8B-4AE4-AF6D-3F3AE55F1047 (resized).jpeg1A03A463-C113-41F2-87EF-E7C7130F023C (resized).jpeg5C0C8C25-5E33-49B3-99EE-B40105C2EA2D (resized).jpeg9877D5E9-9FB1-4528-AE41-B542901CF6E0 (resized).jpegA77D43C2-E4E8-47AF-BBD8-B57A69F66ADE (resized).jpegB630FD03-62EA-4166-AF7A-F11B273EC22C (resized).jpegC55D4C5C-EEC9-4B99-B9B4-729BF42DDE5C (resized).jpegCB598818-B5C5-458A-B36F-A2714AF543EA (resized).jpegCEB3EE95-8CAC-43CA-87E6-9F631A74B44E (resized).jpeg967D0D96-D867-403A-B9F8-B94B11ED66EA (resized).jpeg6AA6CE99-462E-40DD-ADC0-5F582A47F1F4 (resized).jpeg