Fishing Derby (Atari 2600)

For a triple A game publisher as massive as Activision, it’s fascinating to see how humble their origins can be. When they got their start being the first ever third party publisher for the Atari 2600, some of their games were unoriginal yet safe bets, players able to pick up adaptations of Bridge and Checkers if they wanted such simple virtual conversions. However, Fishing Derby was more than just a simple fishing game, as it turned the relaxing pastime into a fast-paced competition to reel in more fish than your opponent. With large, easily identified sprites and an interesting twist on a simple idea, Fishing Derby was perhaps the best of Activision’s initial offerings at showing the potential the company had on Atari before they hit it big with Pitfall! two years later.

Fishing Derby involves a player competing either against a computer controlled opponent or another human player in a competition to catch 99 pounds of fish. The computer is a surprisingly capable player and certainly holds their own, so having decent opposition shouldn’t be a problem even if you can’t find a human player of relatively equal skill. The first little hitching point in the design does come from the capabilities of the two competing fishermen sadly. The play area is one deep fishing hole that the anglers sit above on their respective docks, their line able to extend all the way to the bottom but not able to cross the middle space. You can freely raise and lower your lure and move it about well enough, but the fact of the matter is that there will always be one chunk of the play area your line can’t reach.

This reveals itself as an issue when you consider the movement of the fish you’re trying to snag. The deeper a fish is underwater, the more they weigh, meaning that if you can reel up a catch from low in the water, you’ll be scoring 6 points, whereas the middle area provides fish worth 4 and ones near the surface only provide 2. Each unmarked row in the water is occupied by a singular fish who will patrol between the two halves of the screen, but not with the degree of speed needed to really make snagging them too difficult if they are comfortably in your area. A greater problem appears when you factor in how the fish spawn to replace the ones already caught. The moment a fish is pulled up onto the dock, a new one appears to replace it, often near the same area they were caught in. It’s easy to get on a tear of high-scoring fish if you manage the spawn point well, but even if you don’t get this streak going, the fish meander randomly about, meaning that the high scoring fish might just be in your opponent’s side and you can’t do anything but weakly try to make up for the opportunity discrepancy by reeling in small fries.

While fish will fight you when you pull them up, it’s not to the degree that the lower fish are a risk to go for. They take only a small bit longer to reel in and definitely take less time than going for a bunch of two pounders, but there is a mild equalizer, the developer realizing there wasn’t much exciting to the game if you just kept pulling up fish unopposed. A shark patrols the top of the fishing hole, the large predator nearly able to completely cover an angler’s half of the lake if positioned correctly. Things get a bit more interesting here since you can end up losing your six pounders to the shark if you don’t reel it in when it’s safe, and the shark’s random movement better fits its size, it never lingering too long on a side and often floating a little in both halves so that there is a danger zone to be avoided by both players. This doesn’t discourage the tactic of going for the biggest fish enough nor does it undo the damage of the fish sometimes clustering too much on one side, but it does mean that a session of Fishing Derby isn’t totally doomed just because you’re starting to lag behind in points.

There are a few more complications to Fishing Derby that don’t really tip the scales much but are worth noting. The difficulty switch on the Atari 2600 determines how precise players need to be when snagging a fish. As you lower your line with the joystick and move it about, you either need to get it right on the fish’s nose to get your hook into its mouth or you only need to get it in the general area of the fish’s front depending on the switch’s position. This is a fine enough way to give a player a mild handicap, but the other quirk of play is that only one player can reel in a fish at a time. You can both have one hooked, but the slower player is at the mercy of the fish’s own movements rather than having any influence over its path upward. This is another reason why shooting for small fries won’t avail you well, the shark patrolling the top meaning that a fish caught in the lower regions will rarely be in danger if you get locked out of reeling in while higher up fish might plunge face-first into the hungry predator. This aspect probably isn’t an intentional wrinkle to the strategic design of the game though and doesn’t contribute much to the flow of the game since your line can pull in fish quite quickly. It’s quite a surprise this limitation doesn’t slow down play all that much, Fishing Derby’s pace one reason it can stay somewhat competitive despite the imbalances randomness causes.

Because of the relatively quick sessions, you can start a new round and hope that random chance won’t influence your performance on a second go. Of course, the level of skill needed to do well isn’t that high either, dodging the shark and making decent use of the time your major considerations. Fish movement does mean sometimes you will go for the lower scoring fish, but not really by choice since waiting around isn’t a winning strategy. You do need to keep active though to remain competitive so you are constantly involved and trying to snag fish to avoid falling behind. It’s not enough to make the game enjoyable once you see how the systems work together. Visually for an Atari 2600 game its quite distinct and features recognizable character shapes, although the hyperbolic claim of an old review by Video magazine claiming it had better animation than contemporary cartoons of the time is absurd. It could have at least been an easier game to come back to for modern gamers than the moving squares of a game like Adventure, but hinging success somewhat on randomness makes Fishing Derby harder to get invested in.

THE VERDICT: Fishing Derby’s sound concept for a speedy competitive fishing game can’t quite hit the mark due to the lack of proper balance. The rigidness of your pole’s reach combined with the fish moving as they please can randomly tip play in favor of one competitor a bit too often, victories feeling more like you were simply persistent enough rather than utilizing good decision making or skill. The shark is a suitable complication, but this fishing hole and its one fish guaranteed to each row makes going for the lowest reaches almost always the best option provided the game isn’t arbitrarily tipping the fish distribution in your opponent’s favor. The fast pace and potential for losing a catch does mean that you never feel like a loss is fully inevitable, but a win never feels truly earned since it’s a bit too reliant on how the fish randomly move back and forth.

And so, I give Fishing Derby for Atari 2600…

A BAD rating. In a round where a streak of high scoring snags at a fish’s spawn point occur, Fishing Derby can really feel unfair, but for the most part, the speedy play makes it hard to dwell on the problems randomness injects into the action. David Crane tried to spice up the gameplay with the randomness of the shark and it feels like its movements aren’t so deadly as to put one player too far behind in the scores, but having the fish lined up like they are makes play a little too mindless. You can’t just keep hooking small fries for an early lead because of the problems with reeling in and the possible presence of the shark, so angling at the bottom is pretty much the best option unless low swimming catches are unavailable. If both you and your opponent are getting consistent six pounders or being forced to grab the middle range fish at an equal pace, Fishing Derby does remain fairly competitive and it’s easier to forget the hold the random movement of your prey holds on the flow of the game, but Fishing Derby can never really recover its luster once you notice how important those fish movements are to how the competition turns out. It’s not really a game that gets solved at least, the six pounders elusive enough sometimes you have to shake up your strategy, but it is more of a compromise than a true strategy and the low level of skill required isn’t enough to make up for the lack of thoughtful play.

Even if you spot the flaws in Fishing Derby’s design, they don’t dominate the experience to the degree play becomes excruciating. They mostly just rob a simple title of its potential for quick head-to-head play. Game speed really does a lot to prevent you from dwelling on things like your side having a drought of high scoring fish, but that pace also means even a short period of limited options can decide the game. Fishing Derby’s idea could be better done without having a single fish guaranteed to each row or limiting a player to each side of the fishing hole, but technical limitations lead to many of the design elements it couldn’t get around. There’s certainly potential to the simple concept, and the Sonic the Hedgehog fan game Big’s Fishing Derby actually seems like a direct attempt to reimagine this game into something more enjoyable with its goal oriented design and use of fish as hazards to catching your actual fishing target, but Activision’s first shaky steps into original game ideas thankfully didn’t stop them from later developing some of the best games for the Atari 2600.