The Joys of Jaws on the NES!

Revisiting the not-so-classic Jaws video game from 1987!

Jaws *seems* like the perfect property for a late ‘80s video game. By then, you already had four movies to work from and the concept sounds like a no-brainer; I mean, what Dan Quayle-era elementary schooler WOULDN’T want to pretend to be an 8-bit version of Bruce the Shark and eat everything up in sight?

The Jaws video game we did get on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1987, however, was something totally different. Even today it has sort of a reverse cult-classic reputation as one of those so bad it’s good kind of releases, a game that is technically deficient in most categories but still fairly memorable despite (or maybe BECAUSE) all of its shortcomings.

If you were a Nintendo-loving kid in the late eighties you probably rented this game. I have only the vaguest recollections of playing it myself. I’m pretty sure it was the kind of game I played for ten minutes, got confused and/or frustrated by and never touched again for nearly 40 years. Even then it had a reputation for being an inexplicably weird and counter-intuitive game, but there’s no denying that it did a good job of capturing the vibes of the Jaws franchise (albeit, with a LOT of “creative liberties” taken.)

You might need a little bit of back story to truly understand why Jaws on the NES turned out the way it did. The game was published by LJN, at the time a toy industry monolith that had the brilliant idea to snatch up the video game rights to as many popular movies and TV shows as they could. Basically, they hedged their bets that kids would play anything (or rent anything) that was modeled on things they already liked or were familiar with. Indeed, the LJN inventory is a who’s who of ‘80s franchise: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Beetlejuice,  Back to the Future, The Karate Kid, etc. The problem, though, is that almost all of the LJN-published games were mediocre (and sometimes downright terrible) rush jobs with bad controls, poor gameplay and a plethora of other deficiencies. Which is the perfect segue to Jaws, naturally.

Making a monster

LJN may have published Jaws, but the actual development was outsourced to Japanese firm Westone. And apparently, they didn’t have a whole lot of time to plan things out — and it seems like their understanding of the franchise lore was a bit iffy. Really, Jaws plays more like a board game than a video game, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that the execution ended up … well, you’ll see.

Now, LJN is no stranger to horror-themed licenses. After all, they published NES games based on both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. But those games were a bit more conventional in the sense that they were both “platform action” games with familiar and intuitive controls — jump here, dodge this enemy, pick this item up, etc. The rules of Jaws, though, are far more opaque and unclear. If you ever rented this thing back in the day and the instruction manual wasn’t included, you must’ve been SEVERELY lost.

The game starts off fairly normal. You’re in a boat, there’s some ominous music playing in the background and you’re free to explore an “over world” map that’s basically two screens taped together. From there, you’ll periodically run into random encounters with various aquatic life,  who you have to mercilessly eradicate in order to grab conch shells — which are essentially the in-game currency you need to even think about beating the game.

Right off the bat, you might be thinking “I don’t remember a scene in any Jaws movie where some dude in a SCUBA suit swam around harpooning manta rays en masse.” Well, like I said earlier, the people who made this game took a LOT of creative liberties. And if you think that’s wacky and off-brand, just wait until you start collecting crabs to increase your speed and bombing jellyfish from above in an airplane. I don’t know, maybe it was a deleted scene from Jaws 3D or something? 

The Jaws: The Revenge of video games

The gist of the game is you need to collect enough shells to travel from a port on one side of the screen to the other to power up your character and score new equipment. It seems easy, but this game goes out of its way to make it as impossible as it can. You see, Jaws himself can pop up at any minute and in the early goings he’s practically invincible. You can shoot him 100 times in a row and it doesn’t even knock off one health bar. Basically, if you’re anything lower than level 5 and Jaws attacks you, you might as well shut the NES off because you’ll NEVER put that SOB away. Oh, and if you’re get a “random encounter” while fleeing Jaws, of course the shark attacks you anyway. Even worse, sometimes he’ll corner you in a port and make escape literally impossible. If you need your blood to boil for the stupidest reason possible, by all accounts, you should totally play this game.

I won’t bore you with all of the details (i.e., winning a submarine and collecting starfish for literally worthless “bonus points”.) I’ll just hop to the grand finale of the game, where you finally go one on one with Jaws. After you’ve wiped out all of his health (and yes, I am assuming it’s a male shark in the game and his name is literally “Jaws”) the perspective of the game changes and you have to use a “strobe light” to freeze him in the waters so you can drive the tip of your boat into his gills a’la Jaws 2. This seems like a really easy thing to do but nope, this game made landing the coup de grâce as irritating and clunky as possible. You have to wait until Jaws is RIGHT in front of you doing this little wiggly dance and even IF you push the right button commands it doesn’t do anything nine times out of ten. Assuming you get the one out of ten opportunity, you get a cut scene of Jaws getting gored and sinking to the bottom of the ocean … and the game ends right then and there.

There are a LOT of structural problems with Jaws but the biggest is just how little content it offers gamers. Feasibly, you can beat the whole game in about 20 minutes. And there’s no secondary loop, the game just soft locks to an admittedly chill looking game over screen and you have to manually reset the Nintendo to play it again. Needless to say, this game doesn’t over much in the way of replay value — as in, literally none at all.

A lasting legacy?

So yeah, the game has a lot of obvious issues. But it’s not a total waste. The music, for one thing, is actually pretty great and super atmospheric. And the visuals aren’t too bad, especially the cut scenes when you sail into port and everything looks like it could be the cover of a vaporwave album or something. Weirdly enough, the game is most enjoyable when Jaws isn’t anywhere to be found — which kinda defeats the purpose of making a Jaws game in the first place, but hey, it was LJN’s money to burn, not mine.

Weirdly enough we got another Jaws game — called Jaws Unleashed — in 2006. That one, as well as its 2011 spiritual successor Jaws: Ultimate Predator, actually let you play as the shark and act out scenes from actual Jaws movies (including wreaking havoc at a SeaWorld-like amusement park.) And the original NES game was re-released earlier this year as Jaws: Retro Edition, complete with a ton of 39-year-late bonus stages, in case anybody was clamoring for them.

Sure, the Nintendo game may not be the best approach to the Jaws I.P., but it certainly has its nostalgic value. Objectively it isn’t a great game by any stretch, but it does have a few memorable aspects. I mean, it’s basically a loose adaptation of Jaws: The Revenge that lets you spear fight crustaceans for spare change — which, the more I think about it, might actually be an upgrade over the film itself!