Weyland Yutani - In the Alien Universe, the mission of "The Company" is to obtain a living sample of the species they designate Xenomorph XX121. This is the story of three pinsiders obtaining four living specimens with the mission of keeping them at least alive, and hopefully transform as many as possible into "weapons-grade" (fully feature working, xenomorph heads, etc.)
This thread is first and foremost, a running documentation of all of the technical challenges, discussion, ideas, fixes, part sources, and anything that may help to keep this game going for all to enjoy for as long as possible, as discovered through our process of fixing these games in our posession. I humbly ask you to keep the other negative commentary about the drama surrounding this game, in "containment" and keep the acid burn leaking out of those facilities (other threads) to a minimum.
I'll provide a little background on the adventure in how the games came to be, to set the stage a bit, but recognize.. this thread isn't about the find, it's about the revival and sustainment of these creatures, and likely I'm not going to answer detailed questions about the find as it's really not all that interesting. But also recognize that in order to avoid PM's about "where did these come from?" some level of addressing it has to occur.
Before the full announcement came out about the bankruptcy of Heighway pinball, etc. I had began trying to source leads on at least one alien. The odd part about this is, it took a really long time to find someone who was willing to part with one at a price I was comfortable with and it seemed that the only people willing to part with their games at a reasonable price were for games that were less than stellar (non-working, damaged, etc.), but given that the alien community and the pinball community is so tight-knit one lead turned into two, and two turned into four. Given that we were basically buying non-working or damaged games, we figured that buying a few of them would be the best bet with the hopes of ending up with at least a majority of working games, and maybe 1, hopefully not 2 donor games.
The weeks leading up to the Allentown show I was putting the wheels in motion to have games in a place that was relatively convenient to us, renting a u-haul trailer from Manassas, VA and after approximately 12 hours of pure driving time PinBackpacker and I had 4 alien games in the back, one of which was the Cointaker prototype machine that has traveled around to all of these shows (We will call machine C). A piece of pinball history that I personally think is really cool, so many of us have played this game.
When we finally arrived to Allentown on Friday morning, we thought.. what the hell, let's plug one, people can play it, and if it works, put a price on it, and hopefully this will help us fund a little bit of our adventure. To our surprise the game played extremely well minus the xenomorph head, and it had a 4-person deep line throughout the weekend. A few stuck balls, some weirdness early-on with ball searches, but all-in-all a success. The Allentown show machine (we will call Machine A.) Todd Tuckey was there at Machine A on Sunday doing his thing for quite a while and I look forward to seeing his video featuring it.
IMG_4938 (resized).jpg
IMG_4948 (resized).jpg
IMG_4958 (resized).jpg
This game being out on the show floor led us to a buyer who wanted to buy one from us, and after walking through the condition of all the games as we knew it (Machine D) was sold. Now we had three machines left between us three pinsiders and a little cash in reserve.
Allentown was a lot of fun, and it was great talking to everyone about the game, playing it, and seeing how excited everyone was to play one at the show. Those that know me, know that my passion is restoring games to top-tier level, and sharing them at shows for everyone to appreciate.
Machine C made a brief appearance at the ramada as well..
After a long trip, time at the show, 4 exhausted pinsiders finally arrived back at home with 3 machines in various condition.
To follow, the findings of condition so far.. and the process of getting these specimens converted into weapons-grade machines!
New York, NY
Dortmund
