Welcome to Pinside! Very interesting idea for a your first post. I think at $7k the incentive to destroy the resale value to make a homebrew/retheme is very low

You haven’t seen it because it isn’t cost effective. If you buy an LCD Stern, you’re already at $6K+. On top of that, you’ll pour thousands more to generate a new theme with at least at year’s worth of effort, coding and testing.

If you look at retheme and homebrew games, they’re generally built from scratch or from older donor games because it’s cost effective. Shit, you can retheme a $600 EM into an LCD game if you want, it just depends of the level of effort you’re willing to take.

If anyone were to do this, it would have to be on a P3 game. You have this tiny module and the rest is up to you to develop.

You’re mixing apples and oranges.

Have new video assets been used in Stern LCD games with existing code? Yes, see JP, TMNT, etc.

Can you completely retheme a Stern LCD with totally new video and rules? Yes, absolutely. But with that, you’ll need to essentially gut the game and start from scratch. See Mission Pinball Framework or check out one of the homebrew/retheme threads for examples of new video assets in existing or custom games.

People have changed the sounds and video clips before for Spike 2 games. I think someone made a Deadpool after the movie.

But no one has, as a random example, took an Iron Maiden and turned it into Archer with new playfield art and such.

Anything is possible.
You could put a Kia motor into a Ferrari, but why would you?
There have been video changes inside the existing game code. For example better video of the April O'Neil clips has been done for TMNT. Same overall theme with just those scenes altered.

Welcome to Pinside, where you can ask a sincere question and get the response of "You're wrong."

Sort of. There have been people who have made their own mixes of certain games with pinball browser. Jurassic Park with movie code. Bond without some of the annoying bond girls. Custom sounds and callouts in Deadpool (vulgar). CPR will print you off a custom "Classic" playfield, backglass, or plastic set. https://classicplayfields.com/the-custom-shop/ I don't know if they have access to modern Stern Playfields though. If you wanted to do this, there are those who have changed the assets 100%, but I don't know of anyone who has changed the rules. You could take an existing playfield and move targets around a little bit, but no rule changes. Your lowest effort build would be custom plastics through CPR if they'll make them for you and possibly one of their playfield. Pinball Browser magic to redo the video. Go to a local comic book convention and comission an artist to paint you up a cabinet and provide them a sanded playfield with a sketch of what you want and let them go to town. You could get anything you wanted done for the price of a donor machine and $5,000-$12,000 if others are doing the work I think (mostly art). Note I've never done this, but this would be the way to do it if you don't possess any artistic abilities of your own.

No, he got the response of “yes it’s possible, yes people have swapped content; doing a complete homebrew/retheme seems like a pretty gargantuan task.”

Seems reasonable to me. What he does with that info is up to him.

I think it's a great idea...go for it.

Theme art and sound along with fun play is what I love in pinball. I don't really love alot of the stuff that comes out but always imagine what I could do with any certain game. Iron Maiden is certainly one of those. Deadpool is another. Great shooters but art and execution kill it for me personally.

I'm a bit biased though as I've done a couple of games albeit dmd era, and doing my 3rd now.
If it's something you are passionate about go for it, keeping in mind it may cost you in the long run but you have something special.

Did you decide on a direction? What are the candidate themes?

Your wish is granted!
Re-theming an IM - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/retheme-iron-maiden-to-rick-amp-morty-2

A little late to this thread, but there's also a couple of people who've been working on a new version of Deadpool, Deadpool: Maximum Effort. Not exactly a retheme, but taking an existing Stern machine and recoding it from scratch.

Here's a facebook post about it: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1148598398602739/posts/5352774054851798/

I didn't see any other info about it, but it's an interesting and cool project!