Wildfire

Wildfire™ is a multi-player electronic pinball game released by Parker Brothers in 1979 that "plays and sounds like the real thing" (that's what it says on the box) but in an innovative portable format.

In Wildfire™ up to 4 players take turns to try and score as many points as possible on a portable electronic pinball machine.

To start, players must hold and then release the SHOOTER button to fire a ball up the firing chute. As with a mechanical shooter, players can make the ball travel either "soft" or "hard" through the chute to aim for specific roll-over lanes by varying the amount of time the SHOOTER button is held before being released.

Once the ball is in play, players must try to guide it into as many scoring areas as possible by hitting the ball with a FLIPPER to control its direction. Hit the ball early and it goes in one direction; hit it late and it goes in another. There are also six NUDGE points that allow for further ball control.

Points can be earned during the game by hitting various scoring targets including BUMPERS, KNOCK-OUT gates and the KICKER target. Extra points can also be earned if some targets are lit up first. Refer to the included instruction guide for full details.

In addition to points automatically added during gameplay, BONUS POINTS are added at the end of each turn. To earn bonus points, up to 75000 per turn, the player must hit a series of combinations during the game (see instruction guide).

Each player receives 5 balls per game. When a ball is lost through one of the exit lanes, the next player gets a turn. After the last player has played their last ball, each player's score will be displayed in turn. The player with the highest score is the winner.

Wildfire can be played by up to 4 players at a time. It can also be played at three different speeds: Beginner (Speed 1), Intermediate (Speed 2) and Expert (Speed 3).

For more players: At the start of a game hold the LEFT flipper button and repeatedly press the RIGHT flipper button until the desired number of players appears on the display.

For different speed: Hold down the RIGHT flipper button and repeatedly press the LEFT flipper button until the desired speed (1,2 or 3) appears on the display.

Married couple Bob and Holly Doyle (former astrophysicists and astronomers), and Holly’s brother Wendl (a computer science guy), pitched their idea for Wildfire to Parker Brothers with a working prototype, which consisted of a handheld unit attached through an umbilical cord to a briefcase containing a 16-bit microprocessor, with tons of RAM and ROM, estimated at the time to cost about $3000 dollars!

To put the game on sale at a price point under $50, the developers (Garry & Steven Kitchen) managed to design the final production unit using a 4-bit micro-controller (AMI S2150 made by American Microsystems Inc.) with only 1.5k of ROM and just 40 bytes of RAM!