Shark Jaws

Dating from 1975, Shark Jaws is among the oldest entries in this catalogue and predates the microprocessor era of arcade hardware entirely. Its logic lived in discrete circuitry rather than in code, the display was black and white, and the audio amounted to a handful of tones. You control a diver collecting fish while a shark hunts you across the screen. That is the whole system, and in 1975 it was enough to hold a crowd around a cabinet.

The release history is the more remarkable part. Atari wanted to ride the wave of the Jaws film without holding a licence for it. The cabinet went out under a made-up publisher name, with the word JAWS printed conspicuously larger than the rest of the title. It stands as an early, well-documented case of a games company sidestepping a film trademark through visual sleight of hand, and it says a great deal about how loosely the arcade business operated in the mid-1970s.

Played today, it exhausts itself in a few minutes. There are no levels in any modern sense, no narrative, no progression system — only escalating difficulty and a score. That is exactly why it repays a look. It shows the industry's starting position: two moving shapes, one collision rule, one emotion. The side view and the unmistakable silhouette of the shark did the work that tutorials and cutscenes do now, communicating the entire premise to a passer-by in a second. The OldGame.cz profile keeps it on record as a document of the early American arcade scene rather than as a game to sink an evening into.