*SIGH* And I was doing so well at disciplining myself to not buy any more arcade games that I didn't have room for, too...

...well, not really; I just hadn't actually gone to a game auction for a while!   On October 13th, 2001, I "fell off the wagon" and headed north to Dallas once again for another Stormont auction, and came back with this nifty cocktail table.  (I almost came back with this and a PLEIADES cabaret, but (a) I wasn't sure I'd be able to get both in the car, and (b) the bid went a bit higher on PLEIADES than I wanted to pay for a "generic", obviously non-original cabinet.  In hindsight, I'm kinda kicking myself for that now...)  This game is actually a bootleg clone of SPACE FIREBIRD, called "FIRE CONDOR" – the only differences between this and the original appears to be that the screen flashes red when you get hit, and this version doesn't have a high-score table with initials like the original.  Otherwise, it looks, plays, and sounds exactly like the original.  This game brings my total collection up to nine machines, and was acquired for $100 in fully-working condition.  (Interestingly enough, this same auction also had an original SPACE FIREBIRD cocktail table in the lineup as well – but that one was non-functional, and went for way more than I would consider a non-functional game to be worth.  Either SPACE FIREBIRD is more sought-after than I thought, or someone got a bit carried away...)

This is another "cocktail"-model console.  (See my PHOENIX page for a fuller description of what a cocktail-model console is.)  Unlike my PHOENIX, this one has no major cosmetic problems; the glass top is intact, as is the instruction-card overlay, and the control panels appear to be relatively clean.  The only obvious flaw is that the coin box has had the lock drilled out, but that's easy enough to replace.

The "FIRE CONDOR" instruction card.  As near as I can tell, the wording is exactly the same as the SPACE FIREBIRD instructions, even down to the names of the attacking alien ships.  Yes, they were pretty blatant about bootlegging back then. 

The manufacturer's nametag.  I'm guessing this is supposed to be "Games, Ltd." (now there's a creative company name!), but the lettering looks more like "Games Lid" ... and does anyone know where "Dalas", Texas is? 

I first encountered SPACE FIREBIRD at a donut shop in Salt Lake City – and it, too, was a cocktail model, as I recall.  I later came across one of the uprights at some pizza place in Florida (Godfather's Pizza, maybe?  I can't recall now).  I always thought it was kind of a fun game, although it wasn't one that I played a whole lot at the time...  Still, I'm glad to have one now – I have a soft spot for the less popular games, I guess.

Gremlin/Sega actually licensed this game from Nintendo for the U.S. market.  (This kind of cross-pollination between game companies was common back then – and obviously, this was before Sega and Nintendo became bitter enemies in the home-console wars.  In fact, neither company was even a presence in it at the time; the home-console market was dominated by Atari's 2600, with the just-introduced Mattel Intellivision a distant second.  Nintendo would not enter the market for another 4 years.)  However, Nintendo also manufactured and sold the game themselves, both in Japan and in the U.S. – the major difference being that Gremlin/Sega made full-size uprights only, while Nintendo made both uprights and cocktails.  To the best of my knowledge, no cabaret or cockpit models of this game were made by either company – at least, I've never seen one, and the flyers don't mention them.

SPACE FIREBIRD belongs to the style of vertical space shooter pioneered by GALAXIANS – enemies which loop and dive-bomb at you, rather than simply lining up in formation to be shot a la SPACE INVADERS.  While it didn't blaze any new trails in gameplay or graphics, it was just different enough to be interesting – although I think that SPACE FIREBIRD may have been one of the first, if not the first, game to introduce the concept of enemy ships that required more than one hit to destroy.  (Not counting games like STAR CASTLE, where it took multiple shots to blast through an enemy's protective barrier before you could hit it.)  One of its quirky charms was that your ship moved in a rough arc across the bottom of the screen as you moved left and right, rather than simply moving in a straight line.

PLAN OF ATTACK: The Emperor, Eagle and Gull Firebirds fly together in complex looping formations, firing and attacking from all directions. Defend your ship against the sweeping, twisting, turning birds by launching missiles. Monitor your missile hits because the birds have different resistence levels. The fearless Emperor is destroyed by four hits, the Eagle with two hits and the soaring Gull with one hit. CAUTION: the Eagles are armed with a secret weapon aimed at sabotaging your ship. They drop a giant bomb that's headed straight for you. Earn 50 to 200 extra points by hitting it before it crashes... but watch out! When hit, the bomb scatters deadly flying shrapnel. Avoid the flying shrapnel by firing at the bomb from directly underneath it.

Activate WARP mode to escape impending danger or to strike out at a flock of birds. Each ship is equipped with one WARP period. When activated, your ship is thrust into space with a protective shield that deflects enemy fire. Wipe out Firebirds in the WARP model by ramming into them with your ship, or by firing at close range.

Your ship is controlled by a 2-way joystick (left-right), a fire button, and a "warp" button.  The "WARP mode" is unique, though of somewhat dubious usefulness – pressing this button surrounds your ship with a blue energy field and sends your ship upwards towards the top of the screen, allowing you to attempt to ram the Firebirds.  (You can also shoot at them.)  Unfortunately, since they move much faster than you do, it's unlikely that you'll hit very many.  Once you've exited the top of the screen, you'll re-enter at the bottom and the energy field will collapse.  WARP does not recharge; once you've used it, it can't be used again until your current rocket is destroyed.

One thing the instructions don't mention is that if you don't shoot the bomb yourself, it'll detonate on its own once it reaches a certain height from the bottom of the screen.  It throws shrapnel in a cone roughly 45 degrees from vertical on either side – therefore, it cannot be safely ignored unless you are both well out of range and not under attack from other birds.  The lower you allow it to get before destroying it, the more points you get – but my advice is to not worry about that and just set it off as quickly as possible to get rid of it.  Fortunately, you'll only see one or two of these per attack wave.

Each wave consists of 30 Firebirds – but not all will be onscreen at once; typically, they attack in groups of 4 to 10 birds.  Once you've destroyed all 30 birds, the wave counter in the bottom-left corner increments by one and you go on to the next wave, which features larger attack formations and more than one bomb to cope with.

The original SPACE FIREBIRD displays the 10 highest scores, with initials.  Scores are not saved when the power is turned off.  The bootleg FIRE CONDOR does not appear to have a high-score table.

The cocktail table's interior.  Interestingly, this one appears to be less cluttered than the PHOENIX table – in large part, I suspect, due to the use of a more compact (but, at the time, much more expensive) switching power supply instead of PHOENIX's bulky linear supply, which leaves more room for the coin mechanisms, the monitor's isolation transformer, and the board stack.  Also note that the logic-board stack is nicely shielded inside a metal cage.  For a bootleg, FIRE CONDOR is at least a fairly well-designed one!

SPACE FIREBIRD runs on a Zilog Z-80A CPU running at 4MHz (divided down from an 8MHz crystal).  An 8035 microcontroller serves as a sound generator.  The FIRE CONDOR bootleg appears to be identical in every way; while I haven't compared it line-for-line against the schematic, it appears to have all the same IC's as the original, the circuitry is divided up into a three-board stack just like the original, the graphics and gameplay are identical, and... well, you be the judge. 

More pictures of the game boards.  Each one serves a different function; the one shown above, with the eight socketed EPROMs in a single row, is the main CPU board.  To the right, we see the smaller "Programmable Sound Board", which is attached to the solder-side of the CPU board via plastic standoffs; in the bottom photo, we see the video board.  Like many games of this era, there is no dedicated video-display generator chip as such; rather, the display is generated by an array of simpler TTL and linear ICs connected to a block of shared (relatively) high-speed RAM which can be accessed both by the CPU and by the video-generator circuitry.