Alive Sharks

A small blue shark swims in black void, around it float dots of light and unknown targets. That's Alive Sharks—an obscure DOS piece from 1990 that nobody really knows and nobody will argue about. It has a talent for staying forgotten.

It's a simple first-person shooter. You're a shark with water sounds around and have to shoot targets moving in the dark. No story, no context, no reason. Graphics is primitive—blue-gray pixels that call themselves a screen. Animation moves something a little, sounds are more noise. The environment doesn't look like an underwater world, more like the dream of someone who never saw a shark.

Playing tempts toward simple repetitiveness. You shoot, wait, shoot again. Controls are functional but without impulse, without rhythm, without what would make you keep playing. Shot physics is rigid, enemies respond slowly. The game drowns in compulsive waiting for something that never comes—energy spike, surprise, reason. It lacks content and meaning.

Alive Sharks is an artifact reminding us how little was needed in the nineties to wrap something on a disk and sell it. It's not historically interesting, not magical, not even so bad it's memorable. It's just empty.

Today you touch it only from monotonous nostalgia for how bad old games could be. Even that's not worth the time. You try it two minutes, then return to something with a soul.