Towering Inferno (Atari 2600)
The 1974 film The Towering Inferno saw a 138 story skyscraper go up in flames, and while the Atari 2600 adaptation doesn’t capture that scope, it does try to make up for it with a bit of math. The first skyscraper you come across engulfed in flames appears to be 15 stories tall with you only having to visit nine floors to save people within, but then there are 9 skyscrapers in total that have all ignited, meaning we near The Glass Tower of the film with 135 stories across the buildings despite only 81 floors ever being visited. With the somewhat unusual choice of using a helicopter to rescue people from even the lowest burning floors though, we likely aren’t meant to consider the statistics of the buildings we’re saving, especially since seeing all nine skyscrapers will prove to be a monumental undertaking.
In Towering Inferno for the Atari 2600, you play as the firemen plunging into the burning floors in hopes of rescuing as many people as you can. On each floor there are initially four people waiting to be rescued, but your point of entry exists on the opposite side of the room from where they’re hiding from the flames. Represented by a white “window” at the top of the screen, the hiding spot of the civilians must be reached by your fireman and sprayed a bit so the people will accompany you, after which you then flee back to your entry point so the people can be safely dropped on the ground below by the assisting helicopter.
When you enter a room, you’ll find the challenge arises from a mix of its layout and the movement of the flames. As mentioned, Towering Inferno technically has nine towers each with nine floors, and this technically means there’s a spread of different layouts these rooms can come in, not that many standout very much. Often boxy barriers are scattered around in a vertically symmetrical arrangement, the player needing to navigate their character around these as well as the raging inferno around them. Unfortunately, already the simple barriers prove to be a bit of a problem as your fireman is pretty prone to hitching on the walls in his path. While you have the freedom to move whatever direction you like, your body has a penchant for hooking onto outcroppings, especially since your in-game representation has a long bill on his hat that is fully solid and the hose he holds to his side also extends out a fair bit. It’s difficult to avoid accidentally latching onto a bit of the environment, especially since you need to move quickly as Towering Inferno has a bit of a harsh way of creating a level timer. As you spend more time in a stage, the people you’re trying to save will gradually perish, a level lost if all four die. Even if you’ve managed to reach them and are taking them towards the exit, they’ll still die if you don’t move fast enough, meaning you either need to hotfoot it or alternatively clear out all the fire to stop the death timer from claiming more victims.
Clearing out the fire isn’t a very feasible option beyond the first floor or so though, mostly because the people you are trying to rescue die faster on higher floors. The fire itself is also part of the problem though, because it moves in a fairly erratic manner that can make maneuvering around it rather tough. Naturally, fire is an unpredictable thing in real life, but to represent that in this Atari game, Towering Inferno creates lines of flames that move left and right quickly and at unexpected intervals. Fires will repeatedly flash as well, making it disorienting on top of being hard to track, and even if you think you spot an opening between flames, sometimes the fire may leap across multiple spots quickly. It’s not entirely random how it moves, you can at least make educated guesses on when it might be safe to run through larger gaps between the flames, but the flames of Towering Inferno aren’t all alike and oddly enough, the manual gives the two types names.
The standard flames are given the unusual name of Flameoids. Flameoid refers to a singular tuft of flame that is about the same size as your character, and while it is constantly flickering as it moves left and right, your hose is also quick to extinguish it should you line it up right. Your limited hose range and few options on which angle to point it can make chasing down the constantly moving fires rather fiddly, but one of Towering Inferno’s key points in terms of player influence is whether they’ll play it safe and reduce the amount of Flameoids moving around or try to charge through despite the risk. The other type of fire is a lot more dangerous, if only because it’s exactly what it sounds like: a Wall of Fire. The wall will move like the Flameoids do, flitting left and right in unpredictable ways, but it’s a lot less likely you’ll slip through, meaning you often need to break it up. Spraying it for a bit sends a few Flameoids out to the sides that then need dealing with, a Wall of Fire being three Flameoids wide and appropriately making three spread out flames to replace it once its broken. Rather unhelpfully, flames that move off the screen on the far left or right will appear on the other side, meaning you can sometimes be ambushed by fires taking surprise routes through the wrap around screen.
Perhaps understanding the chaotic motions of the flames were a bit too much to tackle with a small set of lives, so Towering Inferno comes up with an interesting compromise to keep it somewhat manageable. You have four fireman per floor, this refreshed with every stage. Even if a surprise fire burns one, even if hitching on a wall loses you two more, as long as one fireman gets out of there with one rescued person in tow, you continue onto the next floor with four new firemen ready to plunge in to save four more people. This accommodation does make Towering Inferno’s score-focused action game design more feasible to manage, the idea being you’re meant to plunge in as far as you can handle while racking up a high score based on your actions. Spraying out fires provides a single point per Flameoid extinguished while rescuing a survivor grants you a whopping 25 points each, but with how quick those death timers can get, it doesn’t feel like the game expects you to really clear one tower, let alone all nine. This does mean score is the benchmark most will judge their success by and while there is some enjoyment found in trying to press further into the game on your next attempt, it just feels like the factors outside your hands tend to be the things ending it too quickly.
Towering Inferno comes with 7 game variations and two difficulties. In every mode, fire moves through the walls as if they didn’t exist, but Difficulty A will make flames invisible as they pass through solid walls, meaning you’re all but guaranteed to be ambushed by flames you don’t see. Difficulty B keeps them visible no matter where they are, so while the manual may call this the easier mode, it also feels necessary to not only make decent progress, but to make the interesting choices on when to move and risk immolation or to stand and try to spray out some flames before you do. The variations are at least a better mix of options. Game 1 ends the moment you fail to clear a floor, either by not saving the people before they roast or having all four of your fireman perish. Game 2 allows you to continue from the floor you failed on after you reset, but you’ll be accruing a new score. Game 3 bills itself as a practice mode, the player able to retry a floor as many times as it takes to beat it, but it is the way to see the other towers more easily and learn that beyond the exterior color being different, there’s not much of note setting the buildings apart. The remaining variations are all takes on alternating multiplayer. Game 4 has players take turns clearing floors, and if one fails, the other can continue on. Game 5 is similar but the player who fails gets to jump back in by starting again from the very beginning, but Game 6 allows players to repeat floors they failed on and keep going. Game 7 can almost be considered cooperative play though, since after any one player clears a floor, both will move onto the next one. This last mode does feel the most interesting since the others are basically playing separate with no influence on each other, meaning you could just play solo and compare scores afterwards. There are better ways to spend time with a friend, but perhaps reaching the other buildings feels like a less daunting task if you have someone to do half the work with you.
THE VERDICT: Towering Inferno puts in a few protection rails like each floor giving you extra lives and the different variations setting different restrictions on continuing, but ultimately whether you want to get far or just get a high score, you’ll still run into the most common problems with this game’s flimsy design. Your character is prone to getting stuck in an area with rapidly moving and often hard to predict rows of fire, your dinky hose not the best for fire fighting work considering its short range and the erratic behavior of Flameoids. While figuring out how risky you want to be plunging in does make for some moments of substance, dying to annoying features trumps those little moments of on the fly decision making.
And so, I give Towering Inferno for Atari 2600…
A BAD rating. The level design in Towering Inferno always essentially gives you a right and left path, and with the ways the rows of fire move, there’s a bit of thought you need to put in to figure out the smart route to save people in time. The time crunch is reasonable to prevent you from just gradually clearing out all the flames without issue, especially since the fire always manifesting in specific areas means there are technically always safe spaces to stand, but things start to get bumpy when you start factoring in the capabilities of your firefighters. They all too easily can get stuck on the environment when you can ill afford it both in terms of time and possibly nearby danger. Your hose is puny so you have to often stand just below or above a flame and hope it doesn’t zip away too quickly to get sprayed. It’s a little shocking Difficulty A exists since that removes so much vital information, but generally the behavior of the flames is definitely the big sticking point. They don’t need to move reliably to be a fair hazard, but they are far too erratic and jumping from one side of the screen to the other makes it even harder to account for how they’ll move. You don’t have time to make deep assessments, and when you reach the higher floors, the game starts squeezing too hard with its very low time limits for levels. At first it is manageable to an extent, the firefighter shouldn’t have things like his hat catching on walls but you can make those early stages work for the intended level of challenge and there is some thrill in trying to get as far as you can. It doesn’t last as long as it could have though, although at least the included modes that let you play as long as you like can help you overcome some of the frustrations if you don’t care much about high scores.
Towering Inferno didn’t need to let you save everyone, it wouldn’t be very faithful to the film if everyone got out alive, and a raging inferno should appropriately be a little wild. However, a lot of issues in this Atari title arise from things that didn’t kill people in the film, like getting your hat caught on a wall or fire moving out of the building and reappearing on the other side. Sure, there should be some allowances for what can be done with the simplistic representations the Atari 2600 could pull off, but for the fantasy of trying to save people from a burning skyscraper, it feels like many issues specific to video games are the real killers here. Perhaps if it had been released on a stronger system it could have better realized the concept, but instead, this adaptation fizzles out a bit too fast to be an enjoyable action game.