My recollection is that early WWF games did have the magnets, like many DE games of that era. I know we removed them, pretty sure the reason was that they gave little bang for the buck in the game, especially with there already being a powerful shaker motor on board. Looking at those pictures the red Sharpie by the missing stand-up targets makes me suspect that this was a test game, one of the first five or six made, but that's just a hunch. I am pretty sure that the magnet code was present in the CPU software but I don't have the game code or display code to check for sure. And silly me, I don't own a WWF. :) I agree that the plastic changes indicate that it was at least one of the first 100 games. Quite often our earliest test games had "homemade" lettering on some ramp signs, but they were usually updated when they came back to our shop.

My recollection also is that due to some weird Japanese import law we had to have the same number of magnets and motors in every game for that year, so Japanese games might have had the magnets somewhere (maybe not on the playfield, but at least in the cabinet - they didn't care about game features or not, just the total count).

We could know for sure [that this is a Test Game] if we could see the manufacture date on the back of the backbox or cabinet, there is usually a dated sticker. Though sometimes those test games would come back, sit for a while, and then get a sticker with a date later than the production run! That would also be a dead giveaway.

These are pictures of a true prototype cabinet and backglass artwork. That first whitewood game was a narrow-body pinball but all the wrestlers were steroid-inflated widebodies. Some steroid scandal hit and WWF made DE redo the artwork so the wrestlers were more sleek, while in the meantime we decided the market needed more widebody pinballs. There was line art done for the narrow body playfield but there was never a screened playfield, just a whitewood, and I don't think it was ever actually built up and playable.