Project Firestart

The game is a side-scrolling, pseudo-3D action-adventure game. The player's character can run left or right through environments, shooting enemies with his laser gun and entering doors. The game adopted a cabinet projection for giving the action greater depth, and some areas allowed for movement into and out of the background. The HUD and on-screen information is very limited, just showing the health of the main character and the amount of ammo available.

Some of the terminals throughout the space station contain logs and journals of the personnel, which provide a history of the genetic project and thus the backstory - a revolutionary feature in 1989, which has become very common in modern video games. Occasionally, due to a player action or at fixed points in the game, the game would pause for a cutscene featuring either the hero or the monsters.

In 2061, agent Jon Hawking of the United System States is sent to the research ship Prometheus, in orbit around the Saturn moon Titan. Hawking's mission is to make contact with the members of Project Firestart, an initiative of the System Science Foundation, who have recently dropped out of communication with their superiors on Earth. Hawking is further instructed to retrieve all of the scientific data on board the Prometheus and then to destroy the ship, based on the USS' belief that Project Firestart has been compromised and could potentially pose a threat to Earth. Should Hawking fail in his mission, the USS will remotely activate the Prometheus' self-destruct sequence on the assumption that Hawking himself has been killed.

On board the Prometheus, Hawking discovers the entire crew brutally killed and the ship infested with large, hostile creatures. Retrieving the ship's science logs, Hawking discovers that Project Firestart was a genetic engineering program that sought to create a mining species resistant to extreme cold and low oxygen levels by combining the DNA of oxen with a new species of fungi discovered in asteroids around Titan. Hawking further learns that one of the scientists on the project, Dr. Arno, secretly altered the DNA of the mining creatures in an attempt to create a species of super soldiers.

Project Firestart was generally well received by the press in 1989. Zzap!64 rated the game 91%, with the following comment: "Project Firestart is jam-packed with the sort of fast-paced, polished presentation and chilling atmosphere which make software epics". German magazine Power Play, rated the game 78/100, saying it was "characterized by an incredibly dense atmosphere", but at the same time criticizing its use of a disk-exchange system, which requires the player to swap the disks many times mid-game. Computer Gaming World noted the game succeeds outside the traditional mold of action or adventure games and said, "While the game may fail to satisfy devout action gamers because the pacing of the action is slow or doctrinaire role-players because of the lack of true interaction and character development, it is a suspenseful blend of music, graphics, decision-making, action, clues, plot, and even, romance."

IGN has called it the first "fully formed vision of survival horror as we know it today", citing its balance of action and adventure, limited ammunition, weak weaponry, vulnerable main character, feeling of isolation, storytelling through journals, graphic violence, open exploration, cut-scenes, multiple endings and use of dynamically triggered music—all of which were characteristic elements of later games in the survival horror genre. Penny Arcade has similarly described it as "the Survival Horror template in its entirety".