Funky Fish

Funky Fish is an underwater side scrolling shooter released to arcades by Sun Electronics in 1981 and converted for home systems by UA Limited. The player's fish uses a bubble blaster on the swarms of guard fish protecting five boss monsters per level, and each guard destroyed turns into a piece of fruit that reverts to a guard fish if it is not collected quickly. A draining power gauge can be recharged only by touching a boss during the roughly ten second window after it dies, so stalling is punished, and an underwater radar shows which direction the remaining bosses lie in. The Atari 2600 conversion was finished in 1983 with retail box and manual but shelved in the video game crash, and was never commercially released.