Fire Chief

1985 computer games Atari games

arcade games

Why you never see firemen driving the sports cars? And why firemen are not putting out flames in the mazes? Just asking... For no particular reason.

Fire Chief was not particularly original idea - you put out fires. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. Whatever it says on the tin, Fire Chief was just that. The end. Except...

Yeah, the good old "except" thingy - you say one thing when you really mean something else. Actually, Fire Chief wasn’t that original, I mean you drive to a building and put out some fire, you do that in every single game about firefighters. Mind you, you rarely see them drive a sports car, right? Why is that? I mean they would arrive much quicker if they wouldn’t bother with all the extra stuff they drug around the town on the clunky trucks, right? Well, Tim Huntington of The English Software had the same thought, and you put the titular Fire Chief in a (as far as the pixels allow to determine) Lamborghini or really, really pimped-up Ford Fiesta. It must be one of those two. I mean, what other cars had afterburners in the 1980s? What do you mean "none"?

Well, this one had. And for a good reason - the Fire Chief is a busy man, on the way to a burning building to save... some stuff. No, no, no lives or anything like that, that was a job for the regular firefighters, while he, as a chief, was dealing only with the high-end stuff. When you finally arrive to your destination you are facing a maze filled with flames and the target you are trying to reach. Using the limited amount of water you have and, taking under consideration that you are susceptible to fire, you must navigate through a maze, so the flames would not cut you out from your exit.

Of course, if you have a lot of water, you can just put out the flames and the rest is like a walk in a park, but the damn car has a limited space for the water canisters. I mean, the afterburner and cool spoiler in the back take a lot of space... Wait a minute, I begin to see the pattern here... Maybe the real firefighters have a point with the whole trucks thing.

Fire Chief was a simple game, but with high replayability since the mazes were different, the challenge on the highway was usually quite tricky and the game overall a weird mixture, but in a good way.

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Fire Chief screenshots

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