I was sitting on the front porch of my cabin yesterday, thinking about pinball as I often do and I started wondering, now that they’ve officially announced that Queen pinball will go into production, is this the end of the line for Pinball Brothers, or so they have something else up their sleeve.
I know that this is jumping the gun because Pinball Brothers isn’t even done making Alien machines yet and they haven’t even shown gameplay of Queen, let alone started manufacturing it, but I’m thinking about it anyhow :) .
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Pinball Brothers, they have created two pinball machines by picking through the ashes of the defunct pinball manufacturer Heighway Pinball, first Alien and now a Barry Oursler designed Queen machine. A lot of the design for those machines was already very far along by the time that Pinball Brothers picked up the projects. They outsource manufacturing to the excellent Italian company, Pedretti Gaming. Pedretti has been making licensed toppers and other accessories for Bally Williams games for years and it recently began manufacturing “2.0” games for Bally Williams as well, with FunHouse 2.0 "Rudy's Nightmare" being their first.
So far, Pinball Brothers has only produced games that Heighway started before it went away. So I began thinking to myself, what other game was Heighway working on beyond the two aforementioned ones and Full Throttle? I knew that there was another one, but I couldn't remember what it was. So I reached out to my friend Dennis Kriesel and he reminded me that the other game that Heighway had in development was Playboy.
In fact, someone actually took the initial Heighway Pinball layout for Playboy and created a virtual pinball table from it. A brief gameplay video of that table has been uploaded to YouTube. I have embedded it below.
So what do you think? Will Pinball Brothers attempt to make another game after Queen or will they ride off into the sunset? If they do attempt to produce a third machine, will it be Playboy? Would that even be an acceptable license to use in today’s society? There hasn't been a Playboy pinball machine since Stern made one in 2002. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
