hockey7318 posted...
Jesus, I'm old, but not that old PO. What the fuck is chasing that dolphin? A plastic shopping bag?
It's an octopus or a squid. I forget which.
It's hard to tell because the person playing the game in that clip is absolutely
terrible
at it, but you're supposed to judge from the tone of the sonar where the height of the gap in the seahorse wall is (the higher the tone, the higher the gap). Missing the gap slows you down, hitting backwards waves (the < arrows) slows you down, and if you get caught you lose. The goal is to hit all the > waves, pass through all the gaps, then grab the seagull and power-up to attack the octosquid hunting you.
There's no real ending, it goes on forever. The goal is to rack up the highest high score you can. They actually had a contest where if you hit a certain high score (50,000, I think?), you could take a photo of your TV and send it to them and they'd send you an iron-on patch (it was the original achievement/trophy system!):
https://www.atarimania.com/goodies/hi_res/dolphin_friends_patch.jpg
https://www.atarimania.com/goodies/hi_res/dolphin_secret_society_patch.jpg
I had the game as a kid. Sadly, I never got anywhere near to the required high score. I was like 6 at the time, so I sucked at most of my ColecoVision and Atari games.