Project Firestart brings space horror down to Earth in November 1989


It was November 1989, a time when the Berlin Wall was doing its level best to become a rather fetching pile of souvenirs, George Bush the Elder was discovering that being President is marginally less fun than reading the fine print on a nuclear disarmament treaty, and the Commodore 64, that beige breadbin of dreams, was quietly preparing to traumatize an entire generation of Westerners who thought “Survival Horror” was something that happened to other people in Japanese games they couldn’t afford to import.

Somewhere, in the bustling, slightly seedy underbelly of the computer gaming industry, a little company called Dynamix decided it was time to unleash something truly...unsettling upon the unsuspecting Commodore 64-owning populace. They called it Project Firestart. And oh, the sheer, unadulterated hubris of such a title. A "project," as if it were a particularly ambitious attempt at knitting a scarf for a very large, many-necked alien. "Firestart," which sounds less like the name of a computer game and more like what happens when you leave a faulty toaster unattended.

But let, us, for a moment, consider the humble Commodore 64. A machine that, by 1989, was already a venerable old beast, capable of delivering everything from pixelated plumbers to surprisingly intricate submarine simulations. It was a digital workhorse, a friendly beige box upon which one could embark on countless adventures, usually involving saving princesses or blasting aliens who bore a suspicious resemblance to static.

Then came Project Firestart.

One can almost picture the developers, huddled around a flickering monitor, fueled by lukewarm tea and a profound sense of "what if." What if we didn't just blast the aliens? What if the aliens were already inside? What if the spaceship wasn't just on fire, but utterly, spectacularly, wrong?

And so, into the unsuspecting digital ether, Project Firestart was born. It landed in a cardboard box graced with some of the best cover art imaginable on a shelf somewhere, probably next to a game about Olympic bobsledding. Nobody, one imagines, screamed. No bells rang. The universe did not suddenly hiccup and re-align.

Yet, contained within that floppy disk was something quite remarkable.

It was a game about a research vessel, the Prometheus, gone eerily silent. Your job, as the intrepid (or perhaps, merely bewildered) Commander, was to investigate. And here's the kicker: this wasn't just another shoot-em-up. Oh no. This was...atmospheric.

Imagine, if you will, being dropped into a labyrinthine spaceship. The lights flicker. The air is thick with a pervasive, electronic dread. And then, you encounter the crew. Or rather, what's left of them. And it isn't pretty. In fact, it’s quite, quite ghastly. Their logs, scattered throughout the ship, paint a picture of scientific hubris gone spectacularly, bloodily awry. The kind of awry that makes one want to immediately locate a nice, safe sofa and a cup of hot cocoa with marshmallows.

The game presented you with a stark, terrifying choice: fight, or flee? But mostly, it was about survival. You weren't a superhuman space marine; you were a scientist. The monsters weren't just targets; they were threats. They scurried. They ambushed. They made you question every dark corner and every suspiciously dripping vent.

Project Firestart's masterstroke—and by masterstroke I mean “thing that still wakes me up at 3 a.m. thirty-six years later”—is its use of cinematic cutscenes. These are not mere interludes; they are psychological warfare. You turn a corner, the screen fades to black, and suddenly you’re watching a first-person sequence of something with far too many teeth deciding that your spinal column would look better on the outside. Then, without so much as a by-your-leave, you’re dumped straight back into control, usually about half a second before the creature finishes its light snack.

It was, in essence, a masterclass in tension, meticulously crafted on hardware that, by all accounts, should have been retired to a nice, warm attic somewhere, happily running International Soccer. But no, the C64 rose to the occasion, churning out genuinely unsettling sound effects and graphics that, despite their pixelated nature, conveyed a sense of palpable horror.

One wonders what the average gamer, accustomed to the cheerful immediacy of Summer Games or the strategic complexities of Elite, made of it. Did they grasp, perhaps subconsciously, that they were witnessing the nascent birth pangs of an entirely new genre – the "survival horror" – years before it had even thought to apply for a marketing budget? Did they feel that chilling, persistent sense of isolation and vulnerability that would later become a hallmark of bigger, flashier games on more powerful machines?

Probably not. They were probably just trying to figure out which key made the Commander run faster away from the thing with far too many teeth.

And that, perhaps, is the true genius of Project Firestart. It didn't arrive with fireworks and fanfare. It just was. It existed, a quiet, unsettling anomaly in the bustling Commodore 64 landscape of November 1989. A harbinger of things to come, a testament to the fact that even a beloved, slightly ancient computer could still deliver a fright so profound, it would make you check under your bed for grotesque alien entities.

In the end, Project Firestart sold modestly, terrified immodestly, and then vanished into the mists of retrogaming legend, occasionally resurfacing to make grown adults whimper at the sight of a loading screen featuring a rather innocuous-looking spaceship corridor. It was, in its quietly malevolent way, a work of genius. The sort of genius that makes you wonder whether the human race really deserves nice things. Or indeed continued existence.

Project Firestart proved beyond doubt that with enough imagination, a complete lack of budget, and a profound misunderstanding of the concept of fun, eight middle-class white men in California could reach through a computer monitor and touch the primal terror that lives in all of us.

Somewhere, I like to think, there’s a derelict spaceship drifting through the void, waiting for the next curious soul to run a routine communications check.


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