Pinball Manufacturing Inc / Illinois Pinball Inc.

Pinball Manufacturing Inc. was formed in 2004 by Gene Cunningham, a Bloomington, Illinois collector who had earlier set up Illinois Pin Ball Inc. to hold rights and parts from two closed pinball makers: remaining parts stock and reproduction rights bought from Williams in October 2000 after it exited pinball, along with a license to use its tooling, and Capcom's leftover pinball parts stock — along with, by his account, production rights — including the unreleased Big Bang Bar prototype. Because Illinois Pin Ball's Williams licensing agreement barred it from producing complete games, Cunningham created the separate Pinball Manufacturing Inc. to build a production run of Big Bang Bar using Capcom's original circuit board stock.

What began as a planned run of 111 machines grew to 183 as pre-orders exceeded expectations, with extra units built from leftover parts bringing the final count to 191, each machine carrying a numbered plaque. The first European deliveries went out in 2006, ahead of a new EU rule banning leaded-solder electronics that would have blocked import of the leaded-solder Capcom boards; U.S. deliveries wrapped up by June 2007, closing out the run.