We’ve been looking at
Dave Palmer’s high score obliterating weekend at the 1985 Video Game Masters
Tournament over the last couple of weeks, and it’s been illuminating
stuff. This week, we take a look at Firefox, which, before it was search engine, was a film
with Clint Eastwood in it, and a not very exciting arcade game.

Mention laser discs now and people will laugh
and throw iPods at you. The format was beset with developmental
problems and by the time it finally lumbered into the marketplace it was
entirely unable to compete with either VHS or Betamax, and
faced growing opposition from within an industry to whom it had promised
much and delivered little. This offering, then, represents Atari’s
only dalliance with laserdiscs, which – considering that at the time all
lasers were owned by global terrorists living in mountains being pursued by
James Bond – were a great deal less exciting than they sounded.
That didn’t stop Atari from making what was, for 1983, the most technologically
advanced game then seen.

‘Most technologically advanced’ is also a fitting description of the stolen
fighter plane to which you have just been handed the keys in the game
itself. The film Firefox,
in which Clint Eastwood stars as your character in the arcade game, supplies
actual footage, which demonstrates just
how wizard-like laserdiscs seemed in world
before technology.

So let’s consider Firefox. Yes, it has
film clips. Yes, it has a rousing original soundtrack. Yes, it has
Clint Eastwood’s digitised voice offering encouragement at key
points. Yes, Atari built a twelve foot deluxe version of it at
horrific cost, without checking first to see if it could actually fit through
the doors of the average video arcade, which it couldn’t. This
is all lovely and innovative, if, in the case of the last
point, commercially blinkered. But for all that, Firefox just isn’t very
exciting. It is, in fact, an early example of a game
being scaled up to match a new technology, without considering the
game itself. For example, Atari had installed a very pleasing two
handed joystick controller, with which the player can launch missiles, chatter away
with machine guns, and so forth. What the player cannot do is
actually fly the plane, which is on autopilot. All the
player does is point the crosshairs at stuff and unleash
ordnance. As a result, there is no willingness on behalf
of the player to suspend disbelief and actually buy into the idea that he is
flying an incredibly complex and effortlessly death dealing bit of military
hardware. The player is, in essence, no more than the badly flawed targeting
computer. It’s not exactly Top Gun.

Key to success in Firefox is
shooting radar installations. This is a standard motif in just
about every combat flight game. The thing about Firefox, as we have
observed, is that it is not a flight simulation, so there is no swooping and
rolling and mucking about with aerolons and rudders and such.
Because Firefox is
an exercise in placing crosshairs on stuff, all the player has to do is hit
the radars very quickly. It is not unlike fairground whack-a-mole,
in fact, although whack-a-mole offers the chance to win an unwell goldfish
in a freezer bag. Need some fuel? Shoot some fuel depots, a la
the curious get-fuel-by-destroying-it logic we saw in Zaxxon. Nice scenery to look at, with ice fields,
clouds and mountain passes all over
the shop. Excellent. But no gameplay.

We can only assume that our hero Dave Palmer took a good book to read
while yawning through the hours and hours of playing time required to
clock up his 800k high score. There was, incidentally, some
confusion over this figure. Firefox
has two missions to choose from – both pretty much identical except that one
takes place over 9,000 game miles and one over 12,000. Palmer achieved
this score over the 12,000 mile version, on the original program which Atari
later deemed too difficult and replaced with an easier one. As
we have come to expect by now, Palmer is nothing if not thorough, and
held the high scores on both missions on the harder program
setting. It’s probably best to leave it at that, as he’ll
only go and build a Firefox
machine out of household items and play it until it melts.

Next week we visit a familiar galaxy far,
far away, as Palmer turns his attention to saving the ice planet Hoth from
the Empire.