tldr: Using this thread to document my efforts to retheme a Stern Iron Maiden Pro.
I bought Iron Maiden (Pro) purely for the gameplay and rule set. It's a fantastic game (with fantastic PF art too!), but the theme doesn't interest me one bit. Iron Maiden is not my favorite band and Metal isn't exactly my favorite genre. I quickly converted all of the music over to metal covers of classic video game music to at least keep the tone of the machine intact and kept it that way for a while, waiting for Pinball Browser to add video replacement functionality.
There were a few parameters to picking a theme:
It had to have a strong enough soundtrack to support 12 songs.
It had to have enough video content available to pull from for the LCD display without having to do much heavy lifting since I'm new to video editing.
It needed to be complex enough to map concepts to the deep Iron Maiden rule set.
I intentionally avoided themes popular enough that they could possibly be made into a commercial machine.
Persona 5 is a JRPG video game that came out in 2017 and is one of my favorites of all time. The soundtrack is one of its strongest features and the game contains over 100 hours of HD content (plus an animated series spinoff) to pull assets from.
Recently Pinball Browser added a video replacement feature. For now, I'm going to be focused on mapping Persona 5 concepts to the Iron Maiden rule set and using Pinball Browser to convert audio and video assets to the new theme. I plan on also rethemeing the translite, playfield, plastics, and cabinet eventually but I'm starting with the cheap and time consuming aspects instead of the expensive and time consuming items.
I've got a rough draft of how I'd like to map P5 concepts to the Maiden ruleset that I will share soon. I don't imagine there are many Persona 5 fans on this board, but I'd love to get feedback from fans of the game as well!