Trivia / Alien (2017)

• Development Hell: The game was revealed at the 2014 Pinball Expo, slated for release in April 2015. (Dennis Nordman left Heighway Pinball in part because he felt it would be impossible to complete the game in such a short span of time.) The game was delayed several times afterward, with subsequent release windows later in 2015 and 2016 also falling through, before it ultimately begin shipping in 2017.^note Officially, the first game went out in February, though This Week in Pinball's postmortem on Heighway claims that Alien began arriving in customers' homes that July. By most accounts, the reason for this was that the game had a Troubled Production (including issues with design and manufacturing, licensing woes, and alleged mismanagement from Andrew Heighway).
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition:
  • The original game has a "Limited Edition" with a variety of upgrades, like a shaker motor and two beacon lights on the very top of the cabinet. While some of these were sold separately, others (like the alternate backglass artwork) were not. It was intended to run for only 500 units, though the company went out of business before they could manufacture that amount of games in total.
  • The Pinball Brothers remake has a "Limited Version" (abbreviated "LV"). It includes different backglass artwork, two beacons on top of the backbox (similar but distinct to Heighway's Limited Edition), and other changes (including anti-reflective glass and lit sideblades).
• The Other Darrin: MU/TH/UR 6000 is voiced by Carol Thiel instead of Helen Horton (as in Alien).
• Promoted Fanboy: During pre-release publicity, Andrew Heighway described Alien and Aliens as his all-time favorite films, which is why he sought the license to make a pinball table based on them.
• Troubled Production: The game was beset by a number of issues on several levels that stretched out development time for years. An early warning sign was Heighway Pinball claiming in October 2014 that the game would be released the following April, which was such a short timeframe that Dennis Nordman left the company altogether over it. In addition, according to a report from an anonymous ex-Heighway Pinball employee, playfield designer Dave Sanders was not compensated for his work (much like Full Throttle). Another former employee in the same article claims that Andrew Heighway was unaware of what material they could use from the films, including the actors' likenesses and the soundtrack. This led to the developers soldiering forward out of necessity only to have to waste time removing unapproved assets later on.
  
  By the time Andrew left the company in the hands of investors in mid-2017, the same source claims that the game still needed months of work to iron out various issues. This, alongside a flood of refund requests, posed a serious challenge to their plan to actually manufacture Alien machines. Ultimately, the company was unable to make as many games as they planned before their liquidation in 2018 — though the investors' subsequent company, Pinball Brothers, bought and sold the remaining stock before remaking the game starting in 2021.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Dennis Nordman's original playfield drawing, while close to the final game's layout, bears some noticeable differences.
    • There was originally a mechanism that could stop the ball with a magnet, only for a hidden facehugger to appear, steal the ball (through another magnet), and drop it underneath the playfield in preparation for multiball. This was removed (and the area around it redesigned) for cost and simplicity's sake.
    • The airlock screen was originally part of a rotating chamber that would reveal either an alien or the Queen. This was later changed to a single figure of the Queen, which can be seen in both later blueprints and a promotional video for Heighway's staff. Ultimately, Heighway Pinball felt that it was "unloved" and replaced it.
  • The original version's Limited Edition looked noticeably different before release (as in this photo). In addition to being called the "35th Anniversary Limited Edition," it had different backbox artwork by Brian Allen.
  • An anonymous account from a former Heighway Pinball employee claims that, during development, the game used a number of assets from the original films that they were unknowingly not cleared to use. This forced the crew to remove them from the finished product.

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