Firestorm: The Forest Fire Simulation Program - Play Online

This is kind of an oddball game, and in some ways is the quintessential homebrew shareware game of the 90s. It has a somewhat esoteric theme (putting out forest fires), is kind of difficult to play until you understand the logic of the game, has blocky lo-fi graphics, and has goofy sound effects that don't quite fit the mood of the game (Porky Pig saying "that's all folks" at the end).

I first encountered this game when I was in the 5th grade, in the mid-1990s. It was probably just released at the time. Someone put it on a computer in the school computer lab. I remember finding it impossibly hard and frustrating as a 12 year old. Revisiting it 32 years later, it also drove me batty for the first few playthroughs. These fires are no joke, people.

The key is to use your fire crews to cut fire lines (or fire breaks), over which the fire cannot jump. You can also use your air crews to lay down short lines of flame retardant chemicals, which also work like firebreaks. By positioning your crews carefully, you should be able to "box in" the fire before it consumes the entire map.

I was excited to finally figure out how to "beat" the game, even if it took me three decades to do it!

Once you learn how to win, you can of course up the difficulty by adding multiple fires, or by slowing your crew speeds. There is definitely some re-playability here.

Is this a hidden gem of 90s amateur software development? Wouldn't go that far. But it's worth playing to see what the world was like during the 386/486 PC era of gaming.