Sewer Shark

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.

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.

The game originated on the cancelled VHS-based Control-Vision video game console. 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.

Sewer Shark is one of the Sega CD's best-selling games, with more than 100,000 units sold prior to having been bundled with the system. Over 500,000 copies were bundled with the Sega CD, while non-bundled copies grossed about $18 million in retail sales. In the end the game sold more than 750,000 copies.

The game is on the Associated Press list of top ten video games from 1993. They called it "bizarre and wildly entertaining" and a must-have game for all Sega CD owners.