Project Firestart is a classic cinematic action / adventure game for the Commodore 64 computer system. It was designed by Damon Slye and published by Electronic Arts in 1989. The game features a survival-horror like atmosphere, an engaging story with multiple game-paths and endings, haunting and sometimes gory cutscenes, a fitting yet unobtrusive soundtrack at key moments, and nerve-racking laser-gun vs. monster action.

The story is as follows: In 2066, a genetic experiment goes wrong aboard the Prometheus space station. Your job is to go aboard and find out what went wrong.

While this game is hailed by critics (some have called it among the best adventure games ever created), it was never ported to the PC, which is a shame, because its audience was limited. Its gameplay is comparable to later games such as Resident Evil, and it features many rooms which are fun to explore, especially due to the occasional cutscenes and varieties of things to do in the rooms (some rooms provide a history of the genetic project and thus backstory, other rooms play a role in optional subquests, while others contain vital items or contain machinery necessary to solve the game). Unfortunately, one complaint that has been raised against this game is its use of a cumbersome disk-exchange system, which requires the player to swap the disks many times mid-game, causing the player to become temporarily unimmersed in the game. This is no longer a problem, however, for fans who have rediscovered this game and play it on emulators.

Links:

Lemon64's Project Firestart page

Project Firestart | 1989 computer and video games | Commodore 64 games