Bad Crosshair Day - Taking To The Sky With Firefox

Posted by: Paul Smith

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.

  About the author

Paul Smith

When not writing stuff for us, Paul has his own blog here. It deals mainly with his war of attrition with the general public, a conflict in which neither side seems to want to back down.

You'd either have to be mad, or just have something better to do, to miss it.

He has Twitter, too, if you fancy it.