Sound the alarm — Williams’ 1987 Fire! is a five-alarm sprint dressed up as a pinball machine, and Barry Oursler’s design wrings a literal bell on top of the backbox just to keep your pulse up. The hook here, conceived alongside artist Mark Sprenger, is brilliantly simple: a rotating color cylinder glows beneath the playfield to simulate a building going up in flames, and your job is to put those fires out before they spread. Each ball starts with the Fire Multiplier pegged at its maximum, and every blaze you fail to extinguish in time ticks that bonus down a notch, turning hesitation into lost points.
That ticking clock is the soul of the game. Veterans hammer the lower-playfield fires to arm the locks, then drive the center ladder ramp to ignite multiball, where stamping out every flame at once delivers a hefty reward. The horseshoe turnaround up the middle does double duty, advancing your bonus multiplier while briefly raising the ladder so you can stash a ball — a two-for-one shot that disciplined players lean on hard. There are no pop bumpers to slow you down; instead you get fifteen standup targets, raising and lowering ramps that feed elevated locks, and a plunger skill shot where catching the 100,000 switch banks maximum opening points.
With roughly 7,700 built, Fire! found its way onto plenty of routes, and it still plays like an emergency. The storefront windows track your multiplier, the speech barks encouragement, and the whole machine practically vibrates with urgency. Keep your multiplier high, keep the locks loaded, and don’t let the building burn down around you.