Fire!

Some arcade cabinets are gaudy neon invitations to the church of high score. **Fire! (Williams, 1987)**, however, looks less like a call to worship and more like a burning insurance claim waiting to happen. Let me set the scene for you: it’s the late ‘80s, Williams is deep in their baroque pinball era, and someone in Chicago’s River North wakes up and decides they want to make a love letter to horse-drawn fire engines, the Great Chicago Fire, and adrenaline that tastes faintly of ozone and spilled beer.

And so you get “Fire!”—an exclamation point of a title, as if the machine itself is calling for rescue. **The artwork is all flaming rowhomes and frenzied, mustachioed firemen locked in a desperate dance with a city that apparently stored its entire wood supply next to open lanterns.** This is spectacle as nostalgia: the cabinet looks like it should be propped up next to a pot-bellied stove in a Prohibition speakeasy, with lacquered wood grain and metallic trim flashing like the buckle on a fire chief’s helmet.

Let’s talk about how it *plays*, because Fire! is, yes, a pinball game—a real analog beast of clacking solenoids and belligerent multiball chaos. Williams, notorious for their willingness to trick you out of every quarter, here constructs a harrowing little morality play. You, the player, are cast as the city’s last, best hope—armed with a pair of feelingly responsive flippers and a tragically finite attention span. Your objective isn’t just to keep balls alive—it’s to “save” the citizens by hitting ramps, bells, and “water tower” features before, presumably, Chicago falls to ruin again.

This game was designed by Mark Ritchie, a man who apparently looked at history and thought: “Needs more pop bumpers.” Released at a time when pinball was getting trounced by video games, *Fire!* is the sound of mechanical pinball stubbornly refusing to go quietly into that binary night. It’s packed so full of gimmicks it’s practically a fire hazard itself—dual-level playfields, “rescue” missions, and a mechanical bell that tolls like a doomsday clock every time you nearly lose. The multiball launch is triggered by an elaborate “lock” system that’s so convoluted, you’d think you were unlocking an actual fire hydrant (which, let’s be real, most kids in the ‘80s only knew from cartoons and unfortunate skateboard accidents).

But here’s the secret sauce: *Fire!* isn’t about scoring; it’s about the theater. The *cacophony* when you trigger the “blazing inferno” sequence—bells, sirens, chimes, a lightshow that could nauseate a hummingbird—was Williams flipping the bird to subtlety. Your eyes start to water. Your hands are sticky with sweat and what might be someone else’s root beer. The air smells like ozone, burnt popcorn, and the desperate cologne of teenage ambition.

In the end, you don’t walk away from *Fire!* because you’re done; you walk away because you’ve been defeated, physically and spiritually. It’s punishing, unfair, and oddly beautiful—a monument to that moment in arcade history when pinball tried to out-shout the electronic future and managed, for one glorious minute, to set the whole damn city on fire.