The (very long) story of Moehr Firepower

It was 1980. Star Wars had taken the world by storm three years earlier. The newly-released Firepower pinball was a huge hit. Steve Richie and the Williams Team had added the revolutionary multi-ball and flipper-controlled lane change for the first time. It was wildly popular, and they went on to make over 17,000 units. It still “ranks at #5 in the list of the most successful flippergames of all time, with 17,410 units.” (Pinside)

My local arcade at Macomb Mall near Detroit, Michigan had one of those units. In '80 and '81 I pumped it full of quarters that I had earned on my paper route. I tried again and again to get that elusive multi-ball.

In 2016 I was extremely lucky to win my own Firepower as part of a contest in a pinball league in Columbus Ohio. It was 36 years after I played the game for the first time! I loved having it at home, and it was always challenging and fun. 

In 2022 Outside Edge's good friend and partner Keith Campanelli at A Pirate's Life Pinball did a complete rebuild and installed a Hardtop for me. It made my old game look and feel better than brand new. I played it hard for a while.

Then I found I was playing it less and less. Days would go by between games. Something was missing. It wasn't as much fun as it used to be. What could I do to get the old zing back?

"Great game, but..."

​At PinBrew 2023 Paul Vogel had brought his beautifully restored Firepower. He actually won Best Solid State at the show. I talked with him and played and admired his game for hours. At one point I was standing beside the game next to the cabinet header. I was watching Paul plunge the ball up to the top of the playfield where it was trapped by the one-way gates until it went down one of the lanes. For some reason I wondered what would happen if those gates were open all the time?

I asked Paul and he graciously agreed to let me tape the gates open as an experiment. It took just a couple minutes, and then we tried playing again. With his first plunger shot, the ball looped up into the top area above the lanes, and then just kept on going right down through the left spinner lane to the flippers. It was smooth and fast and you were immediately into the action. There was no waiting while the ball bounced back and forth and finally settled into one of the four lanes at the top. I was instantly hooked.

We played that way for quite a while, and I loved seeing the different ways that the ball moved. Taping the gates made a new orbit shot that could be hit from the far left or right side and loop all the way back down to the flippers. The top area was now much more dynamic and less predictable. Sometimes the ball stayed up top long enough to drop down into one of the lanes to light one of the letters in F-I-R-E, but sometimes it wouldn't. I knew when I got back home I had to do the same thing to my own Firepower.

Making that one little mod at home changed how I saw my game. Firepower had some of the zing back! Not only was it faster and flowier and more interesting, I had also done my first simple custom mod. I'm not a restorer at all. I'm a graphic designer. I've never wanted to mess around with my machine for fear that I would make it worse or break something I couldn't fix. But here I had changed something I could handle and it had made the game much, more fun for me to play. I started to think about other things I could change that needed very little technical skill. As a designer, I looked at the graphics with a fresh eye, and something jumped out at me.
​The Firepower backglass shows a space battle. A giant planetoid ship that looks remarkably like the Death Star — it's 3 years after Star Wars, remember? It's in front of a black flaming portal along with a Mini-Me version, and it's attacking a planet. Three triangular ships are attacking the massive circular ship to defend the planet.

The same space battle story is on the playfield. At the bottom is the planet being attacked by a giant planetoid ship, with a single triangular fighter ship blasting away in defense. So far so good. 

​And then I looked at the plastics. 
​The plastics tell the story of a hand-to-hand battle between comic book guys in flying suits and humanoid aliens reaching out to grab you. The alien renderings are actually pretty cool, and I like the bold 80s comic book style and colors. But they don't fit the rest of the epic space battle story! I realized I had felt that way for a long time, but had just shrugged and played on.

Now I was thinking this game is the story of a space battle from the era of the original Star Wars. I wonder what it would look like if I designed a new set of plastics that fit that concept? My idea was not to re-theme Firepower as something else. It was just to make it more visually consistent, and to have it all reinforce a single story. To make it More Firepower.

New design: Planetary Defense Epic 80's Space Battle

​I started doing some sketches. I just started picking up elements from the playfield and backglass and trying to see where else they might fit to reinforce the space battle story. I had found a template of the Firepower plastics on a now-defunct website dedicated to the game (huge help)!
​I like when the ball disappears and reappears, so I changed the shape of some pieces so they would cover the ball path in a couple spots. ​I wanted to see how I could change the feel of the game just by changing the plastics, because that's about all I knew how to do (no rewiring needed). Not all the sketched ideas made it into the final design, but it got me excited about what this could become.
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I knew I was going to ditch the alien figures. This was the space battle, so I needed some alien enemy ships for triangle ships to fight. Although the giant attacking planetoid was clearly a riff on Star Wars and the Death Star, I couldn't use any ships from Star Wars because they were too iconic. This wasn't a Star Wars theme. I needed something cool but less recognizable.

While I was looking for options, we started working on building our Solar Fire Hardtop. I noticed it had some oval spaceships that looked like the Cylon Raiders from the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series. Perfect! It was from the right time period. Those ships were also way less known and recognized than anything from Star Wars, so could serve as a more generic bad guys. The oval shape was a great contrast with the angular ships of the good guys who are defending the planet. I had the quality art because we were building the Hardtop. We had licensing arrangements that allowed us to get permission to use art from the Williams collection. Lastly, Solar Fire had the same artists as Firepower (Constantino and Janine Mitchell), so the two styles really fit together. 

New goal: a great-looking Firepower that's also the most fun to play

​While I was reimagining and redesigning the plastics, I started to think about any new play feature I could actually create. Most of them involved electronics which was not for me. I started thinking about how hard the game was to play. It came out many years before the idea of ball save had become ubiquitous on machines. With Firepower, you get three balls and that's it. If all three drain without you touching them once, it doesn't matter. An unlucky game could be over in less than a minute. Maybe there was a way to make it a little less brutal?

BALL SAVE #1:  One feature I've always liked is a small opening on some games that sometimes let you get a ball back into the shooter lane. It needs nothing more than a couple of posts and a hole. I started collecting pictures of other games that had that outlane ball save feature. I decided to try it. I removed a 6-in piece of wood between the shooter lane and the right outlane. It was just two screws, no big deal, but it felt like a big deal for me because for the first time I was removing something from my game that wasn't meant to be removed. Like I had said, taping those upper gates open had flipped the switch in my brain and now I was willing to try other mods. I had a long history with Firepower, so I knew I wasn't going to want to sell this game anytime soon (if ever). It got me imagining if I was going to keep this, then why couldn't I make it a special one-of-a-kind just for me?

I taped a couple other pieces of wood in place to create a nice little gap for the ball to go from the right outlane back into the shooter lane. I then stole a small rubber from a post and put it on the outlane rail. A couple of tests with the ball showed me that it worked! Not every time, but with a little nudge to the left at the right time, you could bump your ball back through the hole into the shooter lane. And why not? Firepower can be an unforgiving game. Maybe it wasn't a bad thing to have a small chance at a ball save if you had the timing and skill.

I named the outlane ball save HYPERSPACE as a nod to Asteroids and Defender, the classic video games from the late '70s and early '80s. Hyperspace is a button you can push as a last ditch effort when it looks like you are sure to die. That seemed to fit trying to save a ball heading down the outlane. Plus Firepower sounds a lot like Defender. 

BALL SAVE #2:  Paul Vogel had pointed out that there was an extra hole under the apron. A couple of measurements and I realized that it could very easily have been a post that just was never used. I happened to have a post from a Flash, so I added that under the apron. One more slim chance for a ball save! If a ball goes between the flippers fast enough and at the right angle it can hit that post and bounce back up between the flippers. Again, it only happens every once in a while, but it's a welcome stroke of luck.

BALL SAVE #3:  This wasn't planned, but  if  the SHIELD KICKBACK is lit, and if a ball hits the new post under the apron and bounces to the right right, and if it rolls all the way to the kickback rollover, then the shield kickback will shoot the ball back into play! That's a whole bunch of ifs, and it's a great feeling on the rare chance it happens. 

A COUPLE MORE DETAILS:  I removed the taped upper gate arms completely so the new orbit looked clean. I created a little plastic for right next to the shield kickback rollover that said RELAUNCH. I named the plunger lane GRAVITY ASSIST because of the way it looped around the top in a smooth arc like a gravity slingshot around a planet. There was enough space between the glass and the apron to drop a large plastic to extend the visual of the playfield. A little more work and the prototype set was ready to make and test.

The soft reveal at Expo 2023

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​I named the project Moehr Firepower. It's a play on of my last name Moehring, and my design company name Moehr Better. We got the test set done just in time for the 39th annual Chicago Pinball Expo in 2023. I was really happy with how they came out, so the idea was to see if anyone else liked them too. If so, maybe we could offer them up for sale. My Outside Edge partner Cody Stonebreaker and I installed them in our Hardtop booth during some downtime. We had to drill a few new holes and do some fine tuning, but we got them in and they looked great.

Over the 4-day show, we made more tweaks and gather feedback from people who visited our booth and played the machine. Honestly, there wasn't a lot of interest, because I think most people actually didn't see anything different. You kinda had to be a Firepower fan to notice it. That said, the people who were interested were VERY interested.

There are lots of great discussions, and players were very generous with excellent ideas to refine and extend the space battle visual story, and the extra play features. By the last day of the show, we had worked out most of the bugs and had people returning to the booth over and over to play this one-of-a-kind Firepower. It was pretty exciting.

Ready for the world

After many more months of making little adjustments, Moehr Firepower plastic sets are ready to sell! With the new look and new gameplay, I really think it's the most fun I've ever had playing Firepower. It got the old zing back, and I play it all the time again. I hope many of you fellow Firepower fans get to join in on the fun.  ~ Scott Moehring
ABOUT THE MODS:  The gameplay mods were not hard to do, and are completely optional. Do none, some, or all of them! For me, they add a lot of fun to the game, and I don't consider it "Moehr Firepower" without them. Also, all. the mods are all easily reversible. You can put everything back the way it was if you decide they aren't for you, or if you want to sell your Firepower in the original format. In the end, your game, your choice!

Acknowledgments

This project wouldn't have happened without the rest of the Moehr Firepower 2023 Planetary Defense Development Team: Bruce Westfall, Keith Campanelli, Butch Peel, Paul Vogel, and Cody Stonebraker. Thanks guys for helping make this happen!

And of course, a big thank you to the original Firepower 1980 Williams development team: Steve Ritchie, Constantino Mitchell, Jeanine Mitchell, John Jung, Eugene Jarvis, and Paul Dussault.