Cover art by JazzieSculpts.
Our monthly feature extrapolating neat ideas from oft-maligned games for @PIZZAPRANKS‘ Indiepocalypse returns! As you may remember, our last feature covered Friday the 13th on NES: The 8-bit approximation of a popular movie license, brought to us by the fine folk at LJN. In this issue, it just so happens we wound up covering another 8-bit take on a movie license, brought to us once again by LJN. Of course, we’re talking about 1987’s release of Jaws, and pulling a novel concept for progression from its sharp-toothed maw:
I almost get the impression that the intention here was to make the focus of Jaws less about actually hunting down Jaws, and instead meant to center around avoiding them outright as you attend to your other ocean business? Like, I think they may have modeled it more after the classic style of score-chasing game, where endurance is more the goal than a defined clear state. That strikes me as a little “late” for 1987, and the game does end completely with Jaws’ defeat (rather than awarding a load of points before looping at higher levels of difficulty), but could still very well have been the intention. If that’s the case, I expect that LJN and the developers’ intended expectation was for players to genuinely fear the mass of pixels representing the titular shark, and to do their best to play the game trying to dodge those encounters – at least until the point of having felled enough fish and crustaceans to die a rich man, and deciding it’s finally time to face their fear. Of course, how developers may intend for players to approach a game can vary wildly from how the casual consumer ultimately does.
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