The Game: It’s a three-alarm fire! Or so the packaging would have you believe. It’s actually more of a .5-alarm fire, giving you more than enough time to extinguish the blaze and rescue the poor soul who’s trapped in the building. Higher diffuculty levels actually give the game some challenge. Needless to say, letting the fire consume the building (or the person inside) does not brighten your prospects for a video game fire-fighting career. (Imagic, 1982)
Memories: Fire Fighter has always struck me as an oddity among the legendarily challenging Imagic games that accompanied it to the store shelves. Cosmic Ark, Atlantis and Moonsweeper were nothing to sneeze at. On its default skill level, Fire Fighter is something to snooze at.
But perhaps more surprising is the fact that this obvious and easily-executed premise for a video game didn’t make it to the VCS until the 1980s. Fire Fighter‘s simplicity and premise would be more at home alongside early titles like Combat. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the game – with the right difficulty settings, it can actually get to be a bit of a bear – but it always seemed to me like Fire Fighter was a game that fell out of a time warp.