I certainly wanted to have the plunger operate mechanically, not to simply be a button trigger to fire a solenoid à la T2. It was to have a plunger handle - but an unusual one. It resembled a 'T' handle as you'd have on a detonator. At the big moment in the game where you blow up the safe you pulled the handle and BOOM. The safe in the game in my mind looked just like what the Theatre of Magic safe later came to be.

But I did want a means to tell how far the plunger was pulled, because I wanted the moment you performed the detonation to be the climax of the game. You were blowing open the safe, which started multi-ball. Then emptying the safe (getting a ball into it during) was the first jackpot. Then the getaway car lowered over the entrance to the right orbit shot for a second jackpot if you could get even just one ball into it before a timer ran out.

By knowing how far the plunger was pulled & knowing when it was released I could then have sounds / lights synchronized with this big moment. I planned to have a small model of a detonator on the playfield with a motorized plunger such that its plunger was synchronized in sympathy with the 'real' plunger.

I honestly cannot remember for sure if I also planned to have Autofire on this game. Autofire was a pretty new thing. Checkpoint hadn't come out yet. T2 had (non-plunger) autofire and was developed concurrently, but [designer] Steve Ritchie did it at his house and I didn't see it until much later. Also, the 'U-shaped' autofire plunger mechanism wasn't in the Williams parts bin and I would have had to get it designed and tooled just for my project. I'm sure it's something I would have wanted but doubt I was counting on being able to have it.

I can say with absolutely certainty that the prototype pictured [in this listing] had no autofire. The cabinet pictured that it's sitting in was a Black Knight 2000 and no changes had been made to the plunger.