Fire

"The evacuee jumps up from the life net and falls down a little rightwards."  --Fire instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
31st of July, 1980 (Japan)

With Fire we are again blessed with a unequivocally simplistic title that lays out the tone the designers were trying to strike. This time, we are faced with a primal force - a word that leans close into our collective intelligence and whispers "danger". No carefree circus act, no jaunty pirates, no mere garden disturbances. Flames lick the skies, desperate victims leap out from windows, and emergency workers struggle against the odds to save them all. And with each miss now represented by an angel of the departed, there is no mistaking that here we have a life-and-death situation.

So how does this tally with the need for nonthreatening premises I jabbered on about last time? Well, I think one could argue that Fire marks an early turning point for the range in terms of courting the public. As Game & Watch games were designed in tandem to accommodate a two-month manufacturing time, Fire is likely to have been the first designed under knowledge of the retailer reaction to Ball. True, Nintendo used to be quite adept at hiding sales figures from their employees, but as Fire saw the development team swell in size by the addition of two more personnel (Masao Yamamoto and Takehiro Izushi), there must have been some awareness that the future of the Game & Watch range was now more secure than ever before. What better time to introduce danger and death?

Looking at the parabolic arcs of the fire evacuees, a sinking sense of familiarity returns. Yes, here we have yet another juggling game, but again its designers have found ways to put little twists on the format. Most notably, the evacuees one must juggle with the firemen's 'life net' follow a unidirectional path from left to right - giving one a sense of constant progression rather than Sisyphean torment. The number of possible positions the player can occupy has been reduced to just three, but this simplicity is compensated by the complexity of the targets' movement. There are also no incremental increases of speed to ramp up the difficulty, which instead comes through increasing the numerousness of the evacuees the player has to track.

These are changes that make Fire, in my own personal opinion, a more satisfying game to play. Every evacuee taken to the ambulance feels like an accomplishment; a life saved. And even though the torrent of victims is still never-ending (there must have been a real housing crisis), Fire shakes the structure up a bit by introducing a soon-to-be-standard Game & Watch element - the temporary reprieve. For every 100 points scored, the number of evacuees leaping from the flames briefly subsides. This gives the game a nice sense of flow - a just-have-to-get-to-the-next-hundred urgency that compels you forward.

It's not surprising to me that Fire became one of the go-to games for representing the early line, appearing on Game & Watch Gallery, Game & Watch Gallery 3 and Game & Watch Gallery Advance. Actually, it's appearance on G&WG3 raises an interesting issue. An unlockable bonus "secret" claims that early units of Fire were horizontally mirrored due to a mistake by the LCD manufacturer. This is quite an intriguing error, as the prototype designs for Fire show the game was clearly intended to flow left-to-right - and the asymmetrical clock figures (so designed since Flagman to reduce LCD segment usage) could not be easily flipped. It is also a claim that seems difficult to corroborate, despite coming from Nintendo itself, as no erroneous units appear to have surfaced.

Still, if this story is true then it is a testament to the pride in their work this team held - that they took such care in crafting a cohesive experience that a version of Fire with leftwards motion would not be tolerated, in spite of essentially identical functionality. And perhaps even an early sign of the importance of rightwards motion in the future of the company.