ThunderJaws (Arcade) Playthrough

A playthrough of Atari’s 1990 arcade action game, ThunderJaws.

Played on the machine's default settings.

ThunderJaws. Has there even been a more perfect title for a video game? I have no idea how a game named ThunderJaws managed to escape my notice for the past thirty years, but as soon as I learned of its existence, I knew that resistance would be futile. I made it my mission to educate myself, because really, what choice did I have? I mean, it's called ThunderJaws!!

ThunderJaws never had a proper dedicated cabinet. For whatever reason, Atari only sold it as a JAMMA conversion kit, and though the game was adapted for several PC platforms, it never appeared on a dedicated games console.

So what is ThunderJaws? The title is as literal as they come: the game is a mix of Rolling Thunder and Jaws. Wild, huh? Rolling Thunder was distributed by Atari in North America, and it seems that they were mighty eager to imply a connection between the two games.

In ThunderJaws, the villain is a big-bosomed ginger named Madam Q who is "beautiful, brilliant, but totally insane," and you assume the role of a nameless, harpoon gun-toting scuba diver with orders to "attack her lab on Paradise Isle, destroy her mutant army, and find her underwater city."

The three stages each feature two distinct gameplay modes. The first of these modes, the underwater sections, typically involve swimming about, dodging evil scuba divers, and harpooning sharks until they explode into huge plumes of gore, and there are some real standout moments. My favorite was the section that rockets you through a series of narrow, gun-lined corridors - the whole sequence feels like an aquatic version of stage 7 from Gradius III.

Once you're out of the water, the game switches over to its Rolling Thunder-style action mode. In these areas, the playfield is split into two levels that you can freely jump between, and many of the enemies enter the screen from the doors in the background. What really struck me about these sections is the way enemies can hit one another - it's fun to provoke an attack and then leap out of the way just in time to see a group of punk women incinerated by a rocket that had your name on it.

I found the game to be pretty fun, overall. It's a second-rate Rolling Thunder clone with kludgy controls and an excruciatingly high difficulty level, but I enjoyed the challenge of learning the enemy patterns and stage layouts. The game feels unfairly difficult at first, but there's a definite rhythm to the gameplay. Things become much more manageable once you've familiarized yourself with the ways the enemies telegraph their attacks.

I've never cleared it with a single credit, but I didn't feel any need to. I was satisfied when my efforts finally paid off and I saw the credits roll for the first time. Finishing ThunderJaws felt like a genuine accomplishment.

However, I will freely admit that I would've never attempted to tackle this one back in the day. I sank many hours into learning it, and I dread to think of how many quarters it would've taken to do it at an actual arcade.

If you're interested, I let the attract mode run after the ending (27:19) to show the ways it changes as it cycles through. Sometimes you'll see a "this game is excellent" message, on rare occasion a song will play at the title screen, and there's even a "Winners Don't Do Drugs" splash screen buried in there. The sheer irony of seeing that in an Atari game made me smile.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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