Spoiler alert! I wasn’t a cool kid growing up, but maybe I would have been if I had the cajones to sucker my parents into buying me Fireball Island. What is Fireball Island?
Imagine you’re eight and someone took all the Barbies, action figures, doll houses and He-Man playsets and blended them into a candy-spiked hyper childhood fantasy. Slap some rules on this sugar-fueled idea and you’ve got Fireball Island — a game that is pure child-bait bling, and looks hella expensive to make in retrospect.
Fireball Island looked so expensive to produce, that whichever coked up exec at Milton Bradley greenlit the game in 1986, was for sure fired after bosses upstairs learned about the game’s slim profit margins and the retailers started complaining about the amount of shelf space needed to stock this behemoth. The game was a plastic beast and to a eight-year-old’s memory, it was the size of a Buick.
Every time children played Fireball Island, it was as pointless as an actual game as the excuse to kiss “game” spin the bottle. Fireball Island’s game pieces were always missing and everyone was too in awe of all the plastic to bother looking up the rules. Sure, we all knew that there was a flashy red jewel on a mountaintop and we were rolling dice to move towards this jewel (it was constantly changing hands), so we could get this discovery off the island to “win.” Really, this game was about showing off to your friends something that was cool and, by proxy, made you cool.
I knew a kid who had Fireball Island, I didn’t like him, he smelled funny and his mom made us eat bowls of hotdog pieces mixed with mac ‘n cheese, cans of tomato soup and cut up slices of american cheese — like, all these ingredients were mixed together into a homogenous mash, it was strange, yuck! Despite these negatives, I still loved hanging out at this stinky kid’s house because he had Fireball Island, and being near Fireball island was like being as close as possible to a child’s fantasies come to life. So, why didn’t I just badger my parents to buy the game if it was such an awesome time? Because sometimes, being near something so brazen, amazing, and bright will eventually burn you — it’s never a good idea to touch the sun.
See, the best toy-like hook of the Fireball Island “game” was…….. THE FIREBALLS! OK, they were really red colored marbles, but to the playful adventurer (YOU!), these balls were spewing lava that hindered your recovery of treasure around the island mountain. A freak’n large plastic 3D mountain was the “game board” that allowed these fireball marbles to roll down totally geographically accurate paths in the plastic mountainside. But wait! These “fireballs” spewed from a rotating rock-head that YOU CONTROLLED and could direct toward your friend’s adventurer piece and make them get knocked down by the fireball! There were even collapsible bridges around the map that adventurers stood on that could be knocked over (collapsible bridge?… Yes!… FANCY!).
Wow, you might say — this sounds sooooooo AWESOME!!! And….. it was… until it wasn’t. No one had the attention span to read or learn Fireball Island’s rules, the game box was flimsy, easily ripped and required copious amounts of duct tape — game pieces constantly went missing as a result. What started as a game loaded with bling, slowly morphed into a shell of plastic and if you were lucky, a couple marbles to roll around as you fight over messing with the rotating rock-head at the mountain’s top. Fireball Island slowly became a repetitive activity of aimlessly rolling marbles around some plastic as you make silly explosion sounds with your mouth. Fireball Island turned into Pathetic Plastic Mountain With Not Much Going On. Like Fireball Island’s missing pieces, the stinky kid who owned the game became sad and pathetic and every time I see Fireball Island I still have the gross taste of hotdogs, mac ‘n cheese, tomato soup and american cheese slices mixed together in my mouth — yuck.
So of course, as soon as Restoration Games revived the license for Fireball Island in a 2018 Kickstarter, I was the FIRST in line to buy it! Yeah, yeah, I said the game becomes lame and you quickly burn out on it and the pieces suck and are easily lost, BUT… BUT… it’s FIREBALL ISLAND!!!!!…. I had to buy it because… consumerism make one happy… and… and…. FIREBALL ISLAND!!!!!
Excited, I ripped open Restoration Games’ new edition of Fireball Island and can happily/nostalgically report that!!!!….. yup, the box was even flimsier than the original (I heard this has now been fixed, but seriously, the box is like semi-thick paper). But the plastic mountain is cool right? Well… yeah, but the colors on the new mountain board were a bit drab and my plastic mountain pieces were flimsy and warped a bit. It’s now apparent why the original game disappeared in the ‘80s despite it looking so cool, it obviously cost a lot to produce. The new version having an $80 MSRP is obviously not high enough a price to meet the production quality regimens the eight-year-old still inside me expects.
That said, if you have kids (or like drinking games) and don’t have skewed sky high nostalgic expectations for a $500 MSRP quality version of the game, I’d highly recommend getting Restoration Games’ version of Fireball Island. Restoration Games gave the game’s rules some awesome updates to make gameplay a bit less random and it’s clear a lot of love went into making the game design more fun. Despite this, I sold the game before even playing a round, it was all just too depressing as I couldn’t get this strange taste of hotdogs, mac ‘n cheese, tomato soup and american cheese slices mixed together out of my mouth — like seriously, yuck!
If you want to make some new memories of your own, check out Fireball Island on AMAZON now! END OF STORY! AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER UNTIL THEY ALL DIED ON FIREBALL ISLAND!
BTW, did you have a “friend” who tried to impress you with their copy of Fireball Island? Or were you that friend? Let us know in the comments, but first check out this legendary commercial from 1992.
- Fireball Island cost about $16 dollars in the ’80s .
- Despite Restoration Games making a new edition of Fireball Island, used copies of the ’80s game still sell for $200-300 on eBay.
- Restoration Games’ version of Fireball Island made $2.8 million via Kickstarter
- The island came as one solid plastic piece in the ’80s, but Restoration Games’ island is three plastic pieces you stack like a pyramid to help reduce the box size.
- The next time you play Fireball Island with your family, make sure to say “I’m having a BLAST” constantly to elicit groans.
- Fireball Island cost about $16 dollars in the ’80s .
- Despite Restoration Games making a new edition of Fireball Island, used copies of the ’80s game still sell for $200-300 on eBay.
- Restoration Games’ version of Fireball Island made $2.8 million via Kickstarter
- The island came as one solid plastic piece in the ’80s, but Restoration Games’ island is three plastic pieces you stack like a pyramid to help reduce the box size.
- The next time you play Fireball Island with your family, make sure to say “I’m having a BLAST” constantly to elicit groans.
