How to play Funky Fish online
- Swim: arrow keys
- Shoot: Space bar
- Pause and resume: F2 (the console’s colour / black-and-white switch)
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
Each level has five boss monsters, and each boss is guarded by a group of fish. Shooting a guard fish turns it into a piece of falling fruit. Collect the fruit quickly, because if you wait too long it turns back into an enemy. A power gauge adds time pressure: you have roughly ten seconds to defeat a boss before your power runs down. A sonar-style radar shows where the bosses are, so you can find them as the screen scrolls. AtariProtos describes it as an odd underwater game in the style of Sega’s Fantasy Zone.
Why Funky Fish was never released
UA Limited announced Funky Fish for the Arcadia 2001 as well, and it only came out there in two places: New Zealand, on the Tunix clone, and Italy, on the Leonardo clone. The company also tried porting its Arcadia games to the Atari 2600, but none of those ports were sold. AtariAge says it is unknown why UA never released them. According to AtariProtos, a retail box, manual and cartridge were found in 2011, which suggests that packaging was ready before the project was dropped, most likely during the 1983 video game crash. AtariAge has since sold the game on cartridge with a printed box, manual and label.
