Junior Rollerball for trainee snipers

There’s something about the sheer size of so many toys and games of our era; they weren’t just played in the house, they took over the house. Nowadays, everything’s been reissued in petite “coffee table” versions on sale in the Gadget Shop¹. Back then, you needed French windows just to get the likes of Crossfire indoors.

Basically a combination of pre-Pac Man arcade favourite Air Hockey and a fairground rifle range, this two-player combat game required the steady aim of an SAS-trained marksman and the ruthless determination to win of an American athletics coach. The object of each round? To score goals against your opponent by firing a constant stream of steel ball bearings – that’s steel ball bearings, folks – against a rolling puck (also steel) until it passed through his net (incidentally, once again made of steel). Any ball bearings which fell into your half became your next round of ammunition (to be loaded into the top of chunky red firing pistols at either end of the long chipboard playing area).

Crossfire could be a fast and furious game (to paraphrase the advertising spiel) but, by crikey, it was certainly a noisy one. In addition to the endless chime of ricocheting steel on steel, the pistols themselves had a stiff and clunky trigger mechanism that not only discharged each ball with a loud crack but also had a tendency to jam mid-game (calling for a swift and strident blow to free the offending ammo). If nervous relatives felt the need to leave the room, who could blame them? In any case, the footprint required for both game and players to play in comfort (i.e. lying full stretch on the floor) meant that the settee had to be moved, so good riddance.

As with all ball-bearing-dependent games, some would be lost over time. Had it been possible to detach the pistols from the field of play, however, and brandish them – airgun style – in the street, we concede that they would’ve gone missing a hell of a lot sooner.

¹Case in point: you can still buy Crossfire in the shops, although now it boasts a so-called “giant playing field” of just two feet! At least new manufacturers FEVA are British, though, so we’ll let them off.