DD: It probably wouldn't surprise you to know that I have seven aquariums in my house and one in my office. Just thinking about games that we could do... this was right on the border between the 4K and the 8K era of cartridges, where we could go to 8K. We were still trying to think of ideas where it wasn't the complexity of these huge 8K cartridges. That was what made the game. It was simple and fun, a lot like what people are thinking now with casual games.
So with Shark! Shark!, I was simply looking at the fish, and when you have aquariums, one of the things you know with the kind of fish I've kept now for years and years is, if a fish is small enough to fit in another fish's mouth, it is likely to get eaten. So what you do is that you look at two fish and you picture, "Would it fit? Okay, they can probably go together!" or "No, they can't."
Out of that, it just got the idea of Shark! Shark! and the idea of fitting the right sizes in and being able to control the difficulty there, and of course having the shark as the trump card that kept it from being an infinite ramp-up.
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