Christmas Gift Oddities Part 2: Fireball Island (1987)

NOTE: The video says this commercial is from 1992, but Fireball Island is most definitely an 80s relic.

Fireball Island is the one toy I can remember that was way, way more awesome than the commercial. Compared to the actual experience of playing the game, this commercial is a thirty-second power nap. Compared to Fireball Island, even Nintendo was boring. Playing Fireball Island is like buying a magic remote control that sucks you into your television during Raiders of the Lost Ark and then combines Raiders with King Kong and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and makes you run through all the most exciting action sequences for a thousand lifetimes before you’re finally dropped back in your 1980s living room Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe style with only the haziest of memories of the thrills you have just witnessed. No. Just looking at the Fireball Island box is like that. Actually playing the game is beyond all description.
And that’s good, because I don’t remember how to play. I only played it five or six times: It took forever to set up, and I lost most of the pieces right after Christmas. From what I can reconstruct from increasingly patchy memories and a little Googling, you played as a generic Indiana Jones type who had to travel across a hazardous jungle landscape (the board seemed huge when I was five) steal a giant jewel from a Tiki god of some sort, and escape the island before you were destroyed by fireballs. The fireballs were represented by red marbles, which were invariably the first things I lost. No worries, there were always plenty of marbles to be found, but being fatally scalded by a glittery turquoise marble somehow doesn’t have the same impact.

Like in Risk, your careful planning could be undone by the simple roll of a marble, which sent your plastic character hurtling from a plastic bridge and into the “time out” zone, where they waited a few turns until they could play again. Almost every space was a danger zone, and you were never totally safe. Of course, rather than adhere to the rules of the game and frustrate yourself with your own failings as an Indiana Jones knock-off, there were hours of entertainment to be had simply rolling around the marbles and knocking the plastic figures off the board. It’s much more appealing watching a would-be adventurer destroyed when you have no stake in the outcome of their wretched endeavor.

Today video games have advanced to such a degree that a 21st century kid might find something like Fireball Island a little quaint. But that kid is wrong. There was a reason the game was at the top of my Kindergarten Christmas list. Fireball Island is a test of endurance, friendship, and even faith set against a backdrop of tropical volcanic adventure. The kid who can succeed at Fireball Island can succeed at anything. If you play only one gimmicky 80s board game with your family this holiday season, make it Fireball Island.