I first was introduced into pinball in 2019 when a videogame company I worked for purchased an Escape From The Lost World pinball machine. Every time it had issues we called a technician and waited days for him to visit while the machine had an out of order sign. I started to take a look under the hood, learn a bit more about pinball and eventually saw what the current market prices for a new pinball machine were. Like most people outside of the pinball hobby, and without knowing a single thing about pinball, the sticker price was a shock.
Having a lifetime experience in software engineering videogames, and some experience in microcontrollers, I decided to question and look at every part. What it costs, why it costs what it does, can we make it cheaper, can it be replaced with something else. It was my goal to always make the least expensive pinball machine on the market that has fun gameplay and I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that it can be done.
As of today, this endeavor has been a couple thousand of hours R&D, setting up manufacturing processes, and designing a proprietary platform with Pinball Designer to design, program and build pinball machines on a large scale. There is a small documentary that I created about the entire life of this company below.
The current plan is to take some additional time fine tuning the entire pinball making process. When the company goes live, I want the factory shipping games immediately every day with a quick plan in place to scale rapidly if demand exceeds expectations. Right now the plan is to launch Pinball Eternal at Free Play Florida Expo in November 2025.
When the time comes, it will be a great pleasure to bring highly affordable, full sized, full featured games to the market.