The February 1985 issue of Electronic Games had a great review of my first console game. Click here to read it!

Multi-screen action and originality are Aquattack's strong suits. It's packed full of excitement and gaming fun, offering four different scenarios per level of difficulty. Such diversity really puts games through their paces! ... The graphics are nothing short of spectacular... It's worth the effort!

Aquattack was the first side scrolling shooter on the Colecovision. In fact, at the time there were so few side scrolling shooters (everything was vertical) that I had to think about whether the player should travel towards the right or to the left.

Ultimately, I picked travelling towards the left (contrary to the standard followed by every game thereafter!) because I could scroll the playfield with fewer CPU instructions than if I chose travelling to the right.

Aquattack was the only pixel-smooth scrolling game ever shipped on the Colecovision. When we rolled it out at CES in Las Vegas in 1984, the Coleco engineers stopped by to peer at the screen, because smooth scrolling was supposed to be impossible.

The trick I used was to scroll the characters making up the playfield instead of the playfield itself. Scrolling a single wall piece for example, would scroll all wallpieces on the screen simultaneously.