Sewer Shark

However, Hasbro cancelled the Control-Vision in 1989, and Digital Pictures subsequently ported the game to the Sega CD add-on. One of the first titles for the Sega CD and became one of its best-selling games, leading Sega to eventually bundle it with Sega CD units. Total sales were reportedly over 750,000 copies. Shark received generally positive reviews upon release, with critics praising the use of FMV in the gameplay.

• Title — Sewer Shark • Developer — Digital Pictures • Publisher — Sony Imagesoft Hasbro (3DO) • Director — John Dykstra • Producer — JoAnne Michels-Bennett Amanda Lathroum • Designer — Kenneth Melville Charlie Kellner • Writer — Kenneth Melville • Programmer — Charlie Kellner • Composer — Tom Ferguson Jay Ferguson • Platforms — Sega CD, 3DO • Released — Sega CD 3DO • Genre — Interactive movie, rail shooter • Modes — Single-player

Sewer Shark takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where environmental destruction has forced most of humanity to live underground. The player takes on the role of a rookie pilot in a band of "sewer jockeys", whose job is to exterminate dangerous mutated creatures to keep a vast network of sewers clean for "Solar City", an island paradise from which the evil Commissioner Stenchler (Robert Costanzo) gives his orders and critiques. The player's copilot, Ghost (David Underwood), evaluates the player's performance throughout the game, while a small robot named Catfish (voiced by Robert Weaver) scouts ahead and gives directions. The player is later assisted by Falco (Kari G. Peyton), a female jockey who believes that there is a hidden route to the surface. Falco is later captured by Stenchler, who threatens to mutate her into one of his mindless minions. This plot is thwarted when Ghost and the player reach Solar City.

• Illustration — Sega CD screenshot The objective of Sewer Shark is to travel all the way from the home base to Solar City without crashing or running out of energy, and while maintaining a satisfactory level of performance as judged by Ghost and Commissioner Stenchler. As in other rail shooters, the ship mostly flies itself, leaving the player to shoot ratigators (mutant crosses between rats and alligators), bats, giant scorpions and mechanical moles. Along the way, Catfish gives the player directions. If the player takes a wrong turn or misses a turn, they eventually hit a dead end and crash, ending the game. Later in the game, Catfish is replaced by a "crazy lookin' thing", which visually guides the player through the sewers. The ship has a limited amount of energy, which depletes slowly during flight and while firing. Scorpions also rob the ship of energy if the player fails to shoot them down. This energy can be partially replenished at recharge stations. In later areas, the ship encounters occasional pockets of hydrogen that the player must have Catfish detonate to pass through safely. At certain times, Ghost or Stenchler interrupt the player to give direct feedback. If the player is doing well, they are allowed to continue and are occasionally given a promotion in the form of a new call sign. A poor performance will eventually cause the game to end. Sewer Shark is often referred to as an interactive movie due to its use of full motion video to convey the action, and the navigation aspect of the game is frequently compared to Dragon's Lair, since turns are gates that the player must pass through to continue playing.

The game originated on the cancelled VHS-based Control-Vision video game console. The video was split into four distinct tracks that were interleaved frame-by-frame, and the hardware would switch between tracks to, for example, show a turn being taken or ignored, along with the outcome of that decision (e.g. crashing into a wall). In converting the game to the Sega CD platform, Digital Pictures maintained this approach by having the console read all four tracks worth of data as a single continuous stream to minimize seek time on the CD. To work within the console's limitations, the developers wrote a custom video codec to highly compress the data streams so they could be read in realtime from the CD. This codec was also used in Night Trap and the Make My Video series, and an improved version was later used in Prize Fighter. A port was also planned for the Super NES CD-ROM before the system's cancellation. Digital Pictures president Tom Zito has identified Rob Fulop, Kenneth Melville, and Charlie Kelner as the three main creative minds behind Sewer Shark. The video footage in Sewer Shark was directed by visual effects artist John Dykstra. According to Zito, Sewer Shark cost $3 million to develop.