1993 · Biological simulation · Life simulation

El-Fish

A fish and aquarium simulator, El-Fish lets your catch, breed, evolve, and even mutate tropical fish, then render them and let them loose in an aquarium that you design. Except for a few pre-canned graphics and animations, all fish, plants, and even backdrops and floor gravel in El-Fish are generated by the user using genetic algorithms that simulate real life in both appearance and movement.

Released: 1993
Platforms: FM Towns MS-DOS macOS
Genres: Biological simulation Life simulation Simulation
Developers: —
Publishers: Maxis
Modes: Single-player
Country: Russia

About

El-Fish is a fish and fish-tank simulator and software toy developed by Russian game developer AnimaTek, with Maxis providing development advice. The game was published by Mindscape (v1.1) and later by Maxis (v1.1 + v1.2) in 1993 on 5 diskettes.

Each fish in El-Fish has a unique Roe, similar to the genome. This allows the user to catch fish and use selective breeding and mutation to create fish to their own tastes for placing them in virtual aquariums. Around 800 possible genetic attributes (fin shape, body color, size, etc.) are available, which can be selectively shaped into virtually infinite numbers of unique fish. Once fish are created, El-Fish will algorithmically generate up to 256 animation frames so that the fish will appear to swim smoothly around the tank.

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

El-Fish was created by Vladimir Pokhilko, Ph.D. and Alexey Pajitnov (the creator of Tetris), who had backgrounds in mathematics, computer science, and psychology. They were attempting to create software for INTEC (a company that they started) that would be made for "people's souls". They developed this idea, calling it "Human Software", with three rules:

The software needs to be "aesthetically beautiful".

Reception

Computer Gaming World called the graphics as state-of-the-art, but questioned whether there was enough substance to warrant its purchase. The reviewer, an aquarium owner, criticized the "software toy" on its "inability to sustain the player's interest. Once the aquarium has been created and viewed, there just isn't much else happening", with no simulation of an ecosystem needing ongoing maintenance as he had hoped.

In 1996, Computer Gaming World declared El-Fish the 13th-worst computer game ever released.