Heavy Metal Remastered (MLager8 2026)

I have always loved the cult classic 1981 movie Heavy Metal, and have thought the game produced by Rowamet in 1981 never did the animation justice. There's so much to pull from, yet I found the game feels cheaply produced and quickly slapped together.

This game being quite rare with very limited photos available, I found that it is actually an exact copy of the Tatio De Brasil Game "Vortex" which is also in turn, al almost an exact copy of the 1980 Wiliams game "Blackout".

With that in mind, what I've created for you is a reimagining of the original Rowamet game. I've based this game on the great JPSala's Vortex table as I'm told me had input from some of the orginal people who built that game, as well as taken some design cues from Blackout. 

The table has been gone over top to bottom, and retrofitted to work with the original Heavy Metal romset, and adding all the bells and whistles built by the VPW team, including, nFozzy, fleep sounds, rothbauerw code for drop targets, wobble, bumpers, animations etc.
I've done a complete graphical overhaul, with brand new playfield art, fonts, plastics and more. I've gone through the 4k remaster of the film and pulled out frame sequenced that I've stitched together to make a majority of the artwork. Some AI was used for the main Taarna image but, kept to minimum.

All new toys were added that represent key features of the film, including the B17 "Pacific Pearl", The 1957 corvette from the opening sequence, and the house loc-nar is narrating from.

There are 2 built in options for music (which can be cycled with the left magna save), the original OST, as well as an alternate Metal soundtrack. I've tried to keep things authentic as possible and kept the alt soundtrack to the 1980's. Please note the screen on the apron corresponds to the currently playing track, so you may need to adjust the camera if you'd like to see the feature. 

I've built somewhat of a basic PUP intended for FullDMD featuring some nicely restored scenes from the original film that I think add some great immersion, if you have a 3 screen setup, I would highly recommend as that's how I intended for this to be played.

I'd like to thank many members of the VPW team (including Apophis, Tomate, Flupper1, MechaEnron, Burger and many more) who helped me immensely getting the table through VLM, getting the physics in order, pup, code, vr, and testing.

I'm also including a template to make new title cards for the music display screen if you'd like to add/mix in your own tracks.

That's it, have fun!

 

****IMPORTANT**** - NVram installation

Open nvram folder inside your VpinMAME folder and delete any existing copy of "heavymtl.nv"
Extract both heavymtl.nv AND heavymtl.nvb from the zip, into your nvram folder.

This game's rom, like all taito de brasil and rowamet games, is programmed to resume where you left off when the power is cut then restored. This is not an issue for a real life table as you'd rarely walk away when a ball is still in play, but for virtual this can be quite annoying. When you quit, the game is intended to keep you progress so when you start the game again, it will resume with score, balls left in play, etc. For this reason I have, with the help of claude, restored the previously working NVram patch to mitigate this effect and play as other games are played, resetting score, and balls after each reset, but keeping credits and high schore intact.

Currently this only works on windows and VPX utilizing vpinmame, if you are using 10.8.1 WITH the vpinmame plugin, this feature will be disabled by default.