Shark! Shark!

The water here seems calm, blue and inviting. But beneath the surface only one rule applies: eat or be eaten. Shark! Shark! for the Intellivision is a small but surprisingly treacherous little gem in which you control a tiny fish and try to survive in a sea full of creatures who are either your dinner or your undoing.

The mechanics are perfectly simple, and that is exactly where their charm lies. Your fish can only swallow creatures smaller than itself. Once you devour enough prey, you grow, and suddenly you turn from the hunted into the hunter of previously dangerous fish. But a great white shark lurks here too, almost always bigger and lethally fast. The game thus becomes a nervous dance between gobbling up small morsels and panicked escapes from teeth that stand between you and one of your three lives.

The Intellivision was Mattel's console, which at the turn of the seventies and eighties tried to compete with the dominant Atari 2600. It was notable for above-average graphics for its time and its characteristic circular controller with a numeric keypad. Shark! Shark! is one of the titles that showed how even with limited hardware you could build addictive gameplay resting on a clear, instantly understandable idea.

The magic of this game lies in its rhythm. You start cautiously, gather courage, grow, and then comes the moment of overconfidence when you let yourself be tempted by too fat a bite and the big shark punishes you. It is the kind of arcade game where a person mutters the classic just one more, last try, and before they know it an hour has passed. The score rises with every creature devoured, and the urge to beat your own record is simply irresistible.

Today Shark! Shark! is a lovely reminder of an era when games needed neither story nor tutorial. All it took was a single screen, clear rules and enough tension to nail you to the controller. In the context of the Intellivision library it is one of the more likeable and playable pieces, one that ages far better than many a more ambitious contemporary title.

Why play: For pure, instantly graspable arcade fun where growing from prey to predator brings both tension and the joy of chasing a record.