Popular Dark Chaos Virtual Pinball Table Becomes Real Machine in Search of a Manufacturer
By knapparcade
The original sci-fi virtual pinball table, Dark Chaos, has become a real, physical pinball machine. The homebrew version of the game made its playable debut as a real physical homebrew pinball machine at the Golden State Pinball Festival earlier this year. The virtual table's creator, Dan Massie and the team behind the physical version of game are now shopping it to manufacturers in hopes of building a small run of machines. The game is heading to Pinball Expo in Chicago this October as the team looks for a production partner. From VPX to a physical playfield Dark Chaos started as a release for Visual Pinball X, the virtual pinball platform, where the team says it drew more than 11,000 downloads before any hardware was built. Massie, a mechanical engineer, has described a long road to the physical version. It took roughly nine-months to build the current iteration of the machine. He built the game with two collaborators: Rob Avery, who handled the art, music, voiceover, and sound design, and Matt Carr, who built the game-logic framework and handled systems integration. The game Dark Chaos is a meteor-defense game that the team pitches as an homage to the 1980s arcade era — in the spirit of arcade classics like Missile Command, Asteroids, and Defender, with Total Nuclear Annihilation as the clear pinball touchstone. The core loop is a countdown: every 45 seconds a meteor wave arrives whether you're ready or not, represented by a bank of drop targets you have to clear before they drain a health meter. The waves escalate. Between waves, players collect weapons and power-ups — proton cannons, cluster bombs, moon missiles, shields, and a time warp — with dedicated buttons on the cabinet to deploy them, and can run training modes to earn power-ups faster. The game currently contains nine waves, six training modes, two mini wizard modes, and a final boss. A jump ramp feeds a "moon" ball lock for an instant multiball, an upper flipper works with a magnet above it, and a Nuka-Cola-style bottle-cap spinner sits mid-playfield. The build Dark Chaos runs on off-the-shelf hardware — FAST Pinball with CobraPin electronics and standard mechs — inside a Stern Spike 2 replica cabinet, with Mission Pinball Framework driving the software. The art, video, and audio are entirely original and, the team stresses, owned outright with no licensing attached, which is part of the pitch to a would-be manufacturer. The machine features three flippers, three pop bumpers, three slingshots, four "Smart" single drop targets, two ramps (one a jump ramp), a ramp lock post, a diverter, a magnet, a spinner, sculpted asteroid, moon, and spaceship toys, alphanumeric segment displays on both the playfield and backbox, and a backbox LCD. There's also a two-digit display between the flippers for the wave countdown, a nod to Total Nuclear Annihilation. An interesting aspect of this game is how the virtual and physical versions of Dark Chaos connect. Avery says Carr developed a framework that works with VPX that mirrors the Mission Pinball Framework — the open-source software running the physical game — which let the team export the virtual code directly onto the hardware. Avery describes it as a first for the virtual-to-homebrew pipeline and says the game logic framework is publicly available on Git (https://github.com/mpcarr/vpx-glf). The game looks great. Finding a manufacturer that is willing to take on a project like this will not be easy, but I hope that they do and I see Dark Chaos on location someday. The VPX version remains downloadable, and Dark Chaos will be playable at Pinball Expo in October. https://darkchaospinball.com/
