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Before I get started, let me tell you that I think Firepower is just about the best pinball game ever produced. Of course, this is my personal opinion, and you may feel free to disagree with me, but you’ll never change my mind. Yes, I love “Medieval Madness” and would love to own one someday (should have bought one when they were still going in the 3K range <g>!), and I have a blast playing my NIB Stern’s. However I find that anytime I’m down in the game room playing pinball, I either always start or finish with a few games of Firepower. I never get tired of Firepower, and I’ve been playing the one I own now almost every day for 4 years. Put
your “way-back” hat on and let’s travel back to 1980.
This was the “golden” era of the arcade.
Video games were all the rage, and pinball was still holding its
own. I was
in my early 20’s in 1980, gainfully employed and had yet to buy a
personal computer. This meant
that my weekend evenings were spent at the arcades prior to hitting the
bars. The current arcade of
choice was the Malibu Grand Prix in Then at the beginning of the summer of 1980, they put in a Firepower. It was pinball love at first sight! In keeping with Williams tradition of not paying for a license (remember Beat Time and Disco Fever?), Firepower was a direct rip-off of the Star Wars Death Star and x-wing fighters. To this day the backglass artwork in one of the most intricate designs every attempted. The game was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and boy, was it fast! It had everything, flash lamps, multi-ball, speech and the coolest pinball sound every! You want an adrenaline pump, how about the multi-ball countdown, every muscle in your body tightened and your hair was on end waiting for those balls to be ejected. We would go in and line up three or four dollars worth of tokens on the machine, effectively “reserving” the machine for ourselves for the evening. |
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So what makes Firepower such a great game? Steve Ritchie was able to combine in a single game the total randomness (“the ball is wild!”) that differentiates pinball from video games and the control that allows a player to develop a strategy and play the game on their terms. The game features four pop-bumpers at the top of the playfield, you can’t ask for more random ball movement than is generated by a ball bouncing between four pop-bumpers! Through multi-ball in the equation and you have the most wild ball action you’ve ever seen. Firepower was the first game to feature “lane advance” where you could control which of the top roll-over lanes was lit. The bonus multiplier was advanced every time you completed all four roll-overs, and with lane advance this task could be accomplished with just four shots to the top of the playfield (in theory at least!). The ball-locks also gave you a short time-out to catch your breath and re-group during a busy game. I always liked to play for multi-ball rather than high score as I liked the action. Multi-ball was achieved by hitting completing the stand-up target banks in the middle of the playfield to light the ball locks. If you wanted high score and the corresponding free games, you would play the roll-over lanes and the bonus multiplier as well as the “POWER” targets. When Black Knight was released in early 1981 I switched my allegiance (and quarters) to Steve’s next game, but still always put a few quarters into Firepower before we left. Fast
Forward to 1999.
I think the last time I played Firepower in an arcade was probably
1984. The arcades were closing
and the pinball to video ratio had switched to about 10 to 1, so there
wasn’t much reason to even go. I
had purchased my first pinball game for the house in August of 1999 (Black
Knight) and then discovered that you could buy pinball games on Ebay!
This is when there might have been 200 to 300 listings max at any
one time. I searched and saw a
Firepower listed for sale in I’ve owned four Firepower’s over the past 5 years. One I restored for a charity auction at my girls’ school (it went for $3,600, no kidding!), one I sold as a project (whish I had hung onto it), one I converted to the original drop targets and I’m in the process of restoring the other as a stand-up target game. I plan to have both versions side by side. |
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