How to play Fire Fighter online
- Run: left arrow away from the engine, right arrow back to it (and onto it)
- Spray water: hold the up arrow in front of the building; hold longer to spray higher
- Pull the ladder in or push it out: hold Space and press down or up
- Aim the ladder lower or higher: ladder fully in, hold Space and press left or right
- Climb the ladder: up arrow while standing on the engine
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Choose a game variation: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Fire speed: F4 (left difficulty switch: A fast, B slow)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
The fire spreads upwards through the warehouse, and the trapped man climbs a floor at a time to stay ahead of it. Flames you put out stay out. Your water reaches the top windows but not the roof, and the supply is limited.
You can only win with the ladder. It reaches any floor except the roof, and you can only change its angle from the ground with the ladder fully pulled in. Set the angle, extend it to the wall, jump on the engine and climb. When you reach the man’s floor and he runs across to you, the game plays “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to mark the rescue. There are no points; the timer at the bottom of the screen is your score, and the fastest rescue wins.
Once the flames reach the top floor, the fire starts dying out on the lower floors, and eventually the man comes down from the roof, but every second of waiting adds to your time.
Game variations
There are nine games. Games 1 to 8 use a single building, from 10 storeys in Game 1 down to 3 storeys in Game 8. Game 9 starts with 3 storeys and adds a floor after each rescue, up to 10, and your water has to last through all of them.
Tips
- Aim for where he will be. He keeps climbing, so set the ladder for the floor he will reach by the time you get up there.
- Clear the floor below him. If the floor under him is no longer fully ablaze, he climbs down to it.
- Get on the engine. Then the man moves to a right-hand window, where the ladder can reach him.
- Listen to the fire. Until the crackling stops, it is still burning somewhere.
- Save water in Game 9. You get one supply for all eight buildings.
History and reception
Imagic released Fire Fighter in North America in September 1982 and in Europe in 1983. Reviews at the time were mostly kind. Good Housekeeping liked that players save people and property instead of destroying them, and TeleMatch gave it four stars out of six, while TV Gamer warned that the novelty might soon wear off. Later reviewers have been harsher, calling it repetitive and short on tension, and author Brett Weiss described it as perhaps the weakest game Imagic made. US Games released another fire-rescue game, Towering Inferno, for the 2600 the same year.
