From what I remember, we only used the brown ones. The only other person who might know would be Mark Sprenger. He did the artwork and any changes would have probably gone through him.

For the cutouts, my best guess is that the one on the right is the correct one. I would rather have 5 separate cutouts that one long one. There is a better chance of the board warping with that long cutout.

I can say with 100% certainty that I never would have done the black playfield. The obvious reality being that why on earth would I spend all that time drawing each of those fleur-de-lis at the bottom of the playfield in black line only to fill them in with black??? I would not. I never approved of this modification or recall it.

Two of the three images of the roll-over lanes were also modified. The one at far right, with individually trapped roll over switch routings was mine. From what I can see there, I suspect the modifications were done by the silk screen printer of the playfields at the time, Ad Posters [Advertising Posters - Chicago]. They communicated often directly with the manufacturer of the wooden playfield, Churchill Cabinets, and likely made this revision between them. When I look at the routing of the playfield it is evident the grooves ended up being longer than Barry had planned – ending up longer than my trap lines. It is likely that somewhere along the way that Ad Posters modified the playfield graphics to accommodate the rollover routings because ink could build up inside open routings and foul the screen (which is why we left bare wood around any through holes). Likely both versions were different attempts until it suited them. I was not informed about this. That was typical once everything was well into production.

The playfield was the same in both versions. The wood cabinet was hand-stained and the side rails, lockdown bar, and legs were in brass-plated steel. I added a white plunger knob to represent a porcelain knob to be "period correct". The Fire champagne edition had the rotating flame graphic tubes (2) which projected a rolling fire image against a silver opaque pattern I made in the backglass that caused an upward moire effect (sweeping flames) during multiball. Similar effect in the center of the playfield.

At the bottom of the playfield, written clearly for everyone to see, is “Created by Mark Sprenger, Barry Oursler and Dan Lee”.

The entire game concept, including the symmetric layout for the playfield, theme and strategy was my idea. Barry was the mechanical engineer and Dan Lee wrote the software. This was a team effort once the fire started.

I came up with the “Champagne Edition” as I was reviewing the cabinet graphics for the first time at Churchill Cabinet for pre-approval. They had run a few blank panels while setting up the silk screens and one of the samples was on a bare wood panel. I asked Marion [Production Manager] at the time, what if we hand stained the bare wood cabinet and sprayed clear lacquer after applying the graphics for a “period look”?. Marion was all over the idea and commented the majority of his old school Polish woodworking staff would be thrilled to do something different. The “Champagne Edition” was born as a collectors piece and the natural compliments were the brass plated trim pieces and the “porcelain” look, white plunger knob.

Mark Ritchie made several cameo speech appearances in the audio as the classic Irish accent fireman barking out instructions to the crew as the fire raged out of control right down to; “We lost ‘em” ~ when the player didn’t scale the ladder in time to rescue the woman and child in the burning building. [the woman screaming “save my baby!”].

Little known fun fact- there were several vacuum-formed buildings throughout the playfield decorated with many, many architectural decals. This proved to be a very expensive labor process in-house and we almost lost the feature ~ until I called on a local facility for handicapped individuals and offered the project to them. They were beyond enthusiastic to have the opportunity at a fraction of the typical cost and the results were very likely more accurate and of higher quality than if the work had been done on the production line.