The Star Fire arcade game in "Midnight Madness"

This clip is from the 1980 cult screwball comedy, "Midnight Madness". I was the software developer of the Star Fire game, which was popular at the time. The filmmakers wrote that game into one of the movie scenes, and we worked with them to translate the video image to film (which was difficult because of the different frame rate). There's a film credit for "Technical Magic"; that was us. Great film, in its way. Check it out. If you doubt its impact on the popular culture, Google the keyword "fagabeefe" and see what you've been missing.

Note the appearance of a young Paul Reubens (Peewee Herman), and a very young Michael J. Fox. Also note the Death Race arcade game in the background, which became notorious because game play involved driving a car with the goal of running down pedestrians (and when you hit one, he would change into a tombstone). Death Race was from Exidy, the same company that manufactured Star Fire. Death Race was banned in Japan and Germany. I remember the president of Exidy telling us, laughingly, an anecdote of a German arcade operator who ended up in jail for having one.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Star
• Fire
• arcade
• Midnight
• Madness

[cutiepie101779]

omg that smile of his is too cute

[cutiepie101779]

i love you mj. he is so cute, i luv luv luv him. i feel bad for him in this movie

[AtariAndre42]

@MrDirkDaring The real Star Wars game you mention only came out in 1983 and was from Atari and blew away Star Fire because of it's way better game play and color vector graphics. However, Star Fire is still cool because it's an 1980 game, barely a year after SI f.i. And yes they clearly "borrowed" everything from the SW movie.

[zazfilm]

whats interesting is that this guy also starred in a dr pepper ad

[MrDirkDaring]

So that "Star Fire" was a real game? Why does it look exactly like Star Wars? The logo is an identical font, the wireframe models are the ships from Star Wars (Tie Fighters or whatever they're called), and the gameplay even looks like Star Wars arcade game from the early 1980s.