Heighway Pinball Wasn't Supposed to Fail | The Lost Pins
Summary
Retrospective on Heighway Pinball rise and 2018 collapse, and how its Alien title survived via Pinball Brothers.
CaptNRetro's video traces the rise and collapse of Heighway Pinball, a UK boutique manufacturer founded around 2012 with a modular-cabinet vision, covering its Bacardi Cuba Libre commercial run, Full Throttle, the Alien project, the designer departure, investor takeover, and 2018 liquidation. The narrator argues the company failed from scaling before it was ready, while the Alien game survived via Pinball Brothers. Note the transcript spells the company 'Highway' and the Alien designer 'Dennis Nordman'; some details (dates, unit counts) are presented with limited sourcing.
Heighway Pinball wasn’t supposed to fail. They built real machines, shipped real games, and landed one of the most ambitious licenses in modern pinball — Alien. In this episode of The Lost Pins, we break down the full rise and fall of Heighway Pinball: from the early Bacardi Cuba Libre project and their first game Full Throttle, to the development of Alien, the loss of their lead designer, the removal of founder Andrew Heighway, and the company’s eventual collapse in 2018. This isn’t a story about fraud or vaporware. This is what happens when a real company tries to scale too fast — and can’t survive the weight of its own ambition. We also explore how Alien survived after Heighway’s collapse, and how Pinball Brothers rebuilt the game into a stable, modern release. The Lost Pins is a documentary series about unreleased, canceled, and controversial pinball machines — and the companies behind them.
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