Fireworks

When you take the mouse in hand and see the first firecrackers on the screen, you know you are dealing with a game that does not look for an excuse. Fireworks is simply a game about pyrotechnics — you shoot off fireworks, watch them and enjoy it.

It is an arcade fun title for DOS from the mid-nineties that hardly anyone remembers, because it was forgotten among hundreds of other experiments of the second era of personal computers. The game takes as its foundation the simplest idea — fire off pyrotechnics and watch it light up in the black sky. You control the cursor, click on a spot, and an effect is detonated there. No dramatic plot, no boss at the end of the game. Just you, the night sky and fireworks.

Playing is essentially meditative. There is no urgency here, no order that would hound you. You click here, you click there, the colors gleam, the sound of crackling rolls out of the sound card. Given that it is a game without sharp edges, you will not suffer the loss of a life or a score that would punish you. The system is arcade in the simplest sense — these ten or twenty minutes of play are the entire content you get.

Today Fireworks comes across as a digital flower in a digital vase — something you put on as sound wallpaper when you want to feel that old environment of DOS windows and the awareness that a computer is not only for games with a story. It reminds you of a time when an indie experiment literally meant one person with an interest in having his idea exist somewhere, even in obscurity.

Loading it in DOSBox or an online emulator makes sense mainly nostalgically-anthropologically. It is not a game that swallows you — it is a game that calms you for a moment and reminds you that playing need not be a complicated mechanical system. A color, a sound and a desire to shoot off fireworks on an empty stage are enough.