FP was the first. One night I asked Eugene Jarvis if he could "move an unlit light under a ball coming down the lane with the right flipper switch." He said, "yes", and built the code. That same night at Williams we were using Lane Change. No CPU was changing lanes at the time either.

He also puts to rest any belief that Williams' 1980 'Blackout' was the first game with Lane Change simply because its model number 496 preceded Firepower's number 497:

Blackout was manufactured and designed WELL after Firepower. Williams produced many games out of model number order.

Steve comments about the prototype version:

The first 10 games we built had 2 3-banks of drops in place of the standups. They were so crappy that they were making the game unreliable, so we went with the standups for production. It was a smart move. If we had good drop targets it would have sold 20,000, but it wasn't working long enough to earn anything with the bad drops....