In 1989, Project Firestart, a survival horror title on the Commodore 64, was released. It was the story of an experiment gone horribly wrong on a space station known as “The Prometheus.” Its long dark hallways were covered in blood and filled with genetically engineered creatures waiting to turn your character into another corpse. “Firestart” came long before the days of the ESRB; there was no M stamped to its box, but the title was ahead of its time in both images of gore and use of mixed media in video games.

The title was clearly inspired by the popular Aliens franchise. A single glance at the box could invoke the comparison, but the ability to make a game have a cinematic feel in 1989 is what defines the accomplishment. On a system that ran on 64 bytes, the title was able to boast cinematic cut scenes, a long cinematic intro, and several endings. The panning cameras and moving pictures had never been seen before in a game.

“Firestart's" Gameplay invented some genre standards, which were used in Alone in the Dark a few years later, and are still used today. A soundtrack heightens the horror. The creatures bust into room without warning but bring with them a tension raising serious of notes that repeats until the player can blast the creatures or escape the floor. Even when the player entered a dangerous room, a low nagging noise would play through the speakers until the character discovered the horror that awaited him.

The title also utilized lighting effects as the space station’s power is cut at a certain part in the game and those creatures keep coming, gray shadows moving at you through the dark halls, while that horrid music refuses to cease. This game invented terrified button mashing. Firestart made you grow to rue its creepy music and fear its creatures.

Elements of the gameplay itself still occur in popular titles. One mission during the quest has you protecting a female survivor by gunning down corridors full of the creatures before they can reach her. Fans of Resident Evil 4 will be very at home with this task. During the climax, the player must react to a situation that occurs in a cut scene by pressing the button the second control returns to him. This feature is very popular (a little too popular) in games today. Information even had to be gathering from reading disks in computers and watching videos to gain back-story and clues. In a post Alone in Dark gaming world, this device has become the backbone of plot in much survival horror; make the player read if he wants to know. “Firestart,” even has a puzzled based boss fight. The player must slow the creature down with conventional fire until he can lure creature into the proper spot to finish it off. Most gamers cannot even remember how many of these types of boss fights they’ve had to figure out since this title.

The real draw of Project Firestart was its environment, and the fact that nothing like it had existed up until that point. The Prometheus’s rooms were deadly quiet, each step your character took echoed, until a trio of the beasts came lumbering in to tear you to shreds. Close ups of monsters and decapitated bodies would jump onto the screen with roars of sound and no warning. It was pure poetry, and was accomplished with very little technology at the disposal of the programmers. Games like this always make me wonder if I’ve just been too desensitized over the years to recognize brilliance in many new titles, or if there was something very special in those dark corridors of “The Prometheus” in the final year of the eighties.