Zoë Blade's notebook

Firepower

Firepower tech specs

  • Released: 1980[1]
  • Company: Williams
  • Units made: 17,410[1]
  • Type: Solid-state pinball machine
  • Features: Lane change (the first), multiball

Firepower was a pinball machine released by Williams in 1980.

Significantly, Firepower was the first pinball machine to feature animated seven-seg displays, the first to have lane change, and the first solid-state machine with multiball (inspired by electromechanical machine Fireball).[1][2][3]

It's pretty straightforward, with simple goals. For all its boombast when it comes to the Flash-style ratcheting background sound and rapidly flashing lights, the gameplay itself is pretty minimalist. Chiefly, hit all six centre targets, place the first two balls in the two flashing eject holes, hit all six centre targets again, place the third ball in the third flashing eject hole, and you'll enter multiball mode... probably very briefly. It's simple, but still difficult.

Sound

Eugene Jarvis took the sound hardware made by Randy Pfeiffer, and wrote for it a software synthesiser called Gwave. This was later re-used in many pinball games, along with video games such as Defender, Robotron, and Joust.[3]

Even some of the sounds ended up being re-used in video games. For example, Firepower's game over sound effect was repurposed as the level complete sound effect in Defender. This was in turn sampled by Aphex Twin in "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball".[4]

Quotes

At Williams, the sound system did not use a hardware synth as virtually all other game companies used, but rather a dedicated 1 MHz 6800 microprocessor tied to an 8-bit DAC. Randy Pfeiffer pioneered this design and showed its power in the Steve Ritchie 1978 pin Flash. You could in principle make any sound possible, you just had to program it and fit all the data into 2 KB of ROM, and 128 bytes of RAM, along with all the other sounds and program... For Firepower, I also constructed a parametrically driven pulsewidth modulation synth. That was responsible for the background sounds and also several of the signature spacey type effects.

— Eugene Jarvis, 2007[3]

References

  1. "Firepower" The Internet Pinball Database
  2. The Pinball Compendium 1970-1981 Michael Shalhoub, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7643-2074-3, pp. 168—169
  3. "Interview With Eugene Jarvis" Phil Butcher, Richard Harvey, Firepower, Mar 2007
  4. "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" Aphex Twin, Come to Daddy, 1997

Database entries

Solid-state pinball machines: Firepower | Flash

Williams: Firepower | Flash