Sewer Shark (Sega CD) Playthrough

A playthrough of Sony Imagesoft's 1992 FMV rail-shooter for the Sega CD, Sewer Shark.

Originally created in 1987 for the later canceled Hasbro NEMO (a machine that provided FMV playback via VHS tapes), Sewer Shark was Digital Pictures' second major production, building on the foundation they'd established with their previous NEMO title, Night Trap (   • Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition ...  ). When the plug was pulled on the NEMO project, Night Trap and Sewer Shark were both shelved, and its creators were left waiting for the day when consumer-level technology would finally catch up to their vision.

That day finally came with the launch of the Sega CD in the fall of 1992. Night Trap released side-by-side with the Sega CD, and Sewer Shark followed a few weeks later.

Being among the first home games to rely on FMV for gameplay, Digital Pictures' NEMO conversions were major showcase titles for the Sega CD. They received rave reviews from most media outlets on release, and they both went on to become some of the system's best-selling titles.

Sewer Shark is an on-rails shooter that tasks you, a novice "sewer jockey," with navigating a ship through the monster-infested tunnels that run beneath Solar City. If you live long enough to escape, you'll get to live out the rest of your days in a tropical paradise. If you fail, someone will have to clean you off a wall with a sponge.

The gameplay is simple, arcade-style fare, but it's engaging. You have two primary responsibilities:

One, you need to safely pilot your ship by listening to the navigator and choosing the correct direction at each junction point. It's a bit like a game of Simon, just with mutant rats and explosions.

And two, you need to shoot at the enemies with the on-screen crosshairs. Accuracy is important, as each shot drains power from your ship, and even though most enemies won't actively attack, you can't afford to sit back and do nothing. If you let too many go and thus fail to hit the required minimum score at a checkpoint, the baddies will come together to take down your ship, resulting in an instant game over.

These elements make for a good combination of flash and challenge, and since the correct route changes game-to-game, you can't rely on mere memorization to see things through to the end. The gameplay isn't groundbreaking, but it's solid, and it avoids the playability pitfalls that many interactive movies (including Night Trap) fell prey to.

It was the novelty and quality of the presentation that really sold this one, though. Stores used Sewer Shark to wow customers with the potential of the Sega CD. I remember seeing crowds drawn to the game counter at the local Circuit City, oohing and ahhing in front of a TV running the game's intro demo on an endless loop. Interactive, full motion video in a video game was a huge deal, and it impressed people to no end. It certainly did me.

Finally, there's one important thing to note when looking at retro games, and it holds especially true for early FMV titles: they were designed to be played on consumer-grade CRT televisions. On modern high-resolution, fixed pixel displays, every shortcoming is laid bare. Fancy transparency effects become unsightly checkboards of pixels, color gradations are rendered as starkly posterized bands, and motion often reveals obvious signs of judder and compression artifacts.

While this video does accurately reflect the graphics produced by a Sega CD, it doesn't show how the game would've appeared to people's eyes in 1992. On a CRT, the video quality was on par with what you would've expected from well-worn VHS tape. You wouldn't have mistaken it as a LaserDisc image, but it was perfectly acceptable in its time.

That being said, if you'd like a more authentic representation of the intended experience from this video, and if you happen to have an old tube TV kicking around, try routing your computer's display through a signal converter to the TV's composite input. If you're not quite that hardcore, watching it with a good CRT shader will get you 99% of the way there.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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