One of Game Boy’s “holy grail” releases, and a metaphor for the futility of evolutionary struggle. Or something.

Every system worth its salt on the collector’s market has its holy grails: Games that have become so vanishingly rare or expensive that they’ve become the impossible stumbling blocks for anyone hoping to build a complete run of that system’s library. Even Virtual Boy, which didn’t even see two dozen official releases around the world, has several games that run upwards of $1000. Game Boy, too, has its own chase pieces.

They’re not as well known as NES’s grails, though. Anyone who has been collecting for long has heard of Little Samson, Panic Restaurant, or Surprise at Dinosaur Peak. EarthBound? Banal. Rendering Ranger? Old news. Game Boy grails, on the other hand, tend to get a lot less press, because so few people actually care about Game Boy? It’s always been the forgotten child, the system for kids, the second-stringer. So its most prized releases tend to be far less known. Maybe you’ve heard of Avenging Spirit and Kid Dracula, but what about the really weird stuff? Stuff like Sumo Fighter or Bamse—games that would sell complete for a thousand bucks if a complete copy ever went up for auction. Which it doesn’t, because no one knows or cares. 

And then there’s this little gem: Fish Dude. 

Fish Dude perfectly embodies the essence of the Game Boy holy grail. It rarely goes up for auction, and when it does appear it’s often with an insultingly huge price tag attached. In fact, that’s why you see the Japanese packaging here, despite the game’s U.S. release. While the cartridge and manual were lent to Game Boy Works by Armen Ashekian, I’ve been unable to track down the U.S. box for the game—despite casting a net far and wide. Alas, even people with near-complete Game Boy collections haven’t been able to help. It’s not that it’s a particularly precious or worthwhile game… it’s just that no one owned it or kept it around.

It’s not hard to understand why. This is, after all, a game called Fish Dude. It really comes off as a game for which a team of marketing people looked deep into their souls and asked, “How can we make this product as unappealing as possible?” It’s too bad, really, because over in Japan Fish Dude had a great title: Uoozu, or Wars. A little cumbersome for American tongues, perhaps, but a great linguistic pun that plays off the Japanese word for “fish” and the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “wars.” But over here, we just got “Fish Dude.”

There’s not really much to the game. It consists of a mere nine stages, making it about as slight as Mr. Chin’s Gourmet Paradise—though a lot less toothless. On the contrary, Fish Dude can be as ridiculously difficult as Gourmet Paradise was limp. Simply getting through the first stage can be a test of skill and patience, as the game world is populated by deadly foes who pursue poor Fish Dude and will devour him aggressively.

Here’s a basic breakdown of the action: You control a tiny fish swimming around through underwater mazes, attempting to devour a set number of tinier fishes so you can grow to your next evolutionary state or whatever. Meanwhile, you need to dodge ravenous larger fish—there’s always a bigger fish—who hope to eat you in turn. It’s kind of like Pac-Man, except brutally difficult; the camera viewpoint is zoomed in extremely close to the action, and everything moves at a rapid clip, which means enemies can appear from off-screen be on top of you within a split second.

To make things even more difficult, it takes Fish Dude a moment to gulp down his victims, leaving you motionless and defensive as you masticate. If you accidentally bump into a little fish while evading a bigger one, you’re basically dead, as your jaw flaps pathetically on your unwanted meal. While you can technically spit out a fish without eating it to save time, everything happens so quickly there may be no room to do so.

You can also evade big fish by leaping out of the water, but this mechanic also falls athwart of the zoomed-in viewpoint. Seagulls and boats (crewed by hungry kittens) patrol the surface of the water, and the cramped camera means that you may not realize danger lurks above until you’ve leapt from the water and it’s too late.

The premise of eating enemies to grow to the next stage has been explored in quite a few other games, such as E.V.O. for Super NES, Cubivore for GameCube, and the early phases of Will Wright’s magnificent flop Spore. It’s never been done as unremarkably as it is here, though. The growth mechanic actually works to your detriment: The further you venture into the game, the larger Fish Dude grows. This leaves you less room for evasion and makes it harder to slip between narrow spaces to safety. This is kind of a clever idea, but in practice it also works out to be kind of frustrating. 

It’s worth noting, though, that Fish Dude does offer players one advantage: You have a friend in the form of octopuses that live in several of the stages. When you bump into an octopus, you’ll cause the screen colors to invert—presumably to represent ink being sprayed into the water—and while the screen is scrambled, you’re briefly safe from the big fish.

Finally, the gameplay changes for the ninth and final stage. Here, Fish Dude becomes what the manual refers to as a “death match” wherein it’s just you and a few big fish swimming around trying to avoid a human diver while turning the tables on your foes. If you can chomp a big fish’s tail here, you can eat it. Gulp down three of them and you win, game over, with the option to play again at an even higher difficulty level.

And that’s the entirety of this game. Not much, right? It’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s also nothing to write home about. Certainly not the kind of game that should cost upwards of $50 on the after market for the cartridge alone. But, well, that’s the thing about Fish Dude.  It’s wildly expensive because who would have bought this game back in the day? It has a terrible name, unengaging box art, a middling premise, and hails from a trio of almost completely unknown, under-the-radar corporations.

So far as I can tell, its reputed developer, Salio, produced a grand total of four games in the course of its brief existence on this earth. The most interesting thing about those four games is that two of them were licensed from Tecmo and comprised the only two third-party titles ever to be published on SEGA’s Mark III console, the Japanese equivalent of the Master System: Argus no Juujiken (aka Rygar) and Solomon’s Key. Fish Dude would be the company’s fourth and final creation.

Japanese publisher Towa Chiki we’ve seen already on Game Boy Works as the company behind the perfectly mundane classic board game adaptation Taikyoku Renju. As with Salio, Fish Dude would be the final video game from Towa Chiki, too.

In fact, the only company that appears to have survived the creation of Fish Dude was U.S. publisher Sofel, one of the forgotten nobodies of the 8-bit era. Sofel is probably best known for the Casino Kid games, which have a decent reputation among NES fans. After releasing Fish Dude here, the company’s U.S. branch would go on to publish Z-tier NES titles KlashBall and Dragon Fighter, as well as TKO Super Championship Boxing for Super NES. Soon after that, however, the company retreated back to Japan-only publishing before fading from existence from even that market a few years later.

There’s really nothing happy in the Fish Dude legacy. It’s an unremarkable game created by doomed companies, and you can expect to pay dearly for the questionable privilege of playing it. About the only thing Fish Dude really has going for it is the fact that its U.S. branding and marketing are the platonic ideal of the garbage The Simpsons would make fun of a few years later with “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.” 

Sadly, Salio died on the way back to its home planet. 

Every system worth its salt on the collector’s market has its holy grails: Games that have become so vanishingly rare or expensive that they’ve become the impossible stumbling blocks for anyone hoping to build a complete run of that system’s library. Even Virtual Boy, which didn’t even see two dozen official releases around the world, has several games that run upwards of $1000. Game Boy, too, has its own chase pieces.

They’re not as well known as NES’s grails, though. Anyone who has been collecting for long has heard of Little Samson, Panic Restaurant, or Surprise at Dinosaur Peak. EarthBound? Banal. Rendering Ranger? Old news. Game Boy grails, on the other hand, tend to get a lot less press, because so few people actually care about Game Boy? It’s always been the forgotten child, the system for kids, the second-stringer. So its most prized releases tend to be far less known. Maybe you’ve heard of Avenging Spirit and Kid Dracula, but what about the really weird stuff? Stuff like Sumo Fighter or Bamse—games that would sell complete for a thousand bucks if a complete copy ever went up for auction. Which it doesn’t, because no one knows or cares. 

And then there’s this little gem: Fish Dude. 

Fish Dude perfectly embodies the essence of the Game Boy holy grail. It rarely goes up for auction, and when it does appear it’s often with an insultingly huge price tag attached. In fact, that’s why you see the Japanese packaging here, despite the game’s U.S. release. While the cartridge and manual were lent to Game Boy Works by Armen Ashekian, I’ve been unable to track down the U.S. box for the game—despite casting a net far and wide. Alas, even people with near-complete Game Boy collections haven’t been able to help. It’s not that it’s a particularly precious or worthwhile game… it’s just that no one owned it or kept it around.

It’s not hard to understand why. This is, after all, a game called Fish Dude. It really comes off as a game for which a team of marketing people looked deep into their souls and asked, “How can we make this product as unappealing as possible?” It’s too bad, really, because over in Japan Fish Dude had a great title: Uoozu, or Wars. A little cumbersome for American tongues, perhaps, but a great linguistic pun that plays off the Japanese word for “fish” and the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “wars.” But over here, we just got “Fish Dude.”

There’s not really much to the game. It consists of a mere nine stages, making it about as slight as Mr. Chin’s Gourmet Paradise—though a lot less toothless. On the contrary, Fish Dude can be as ridiculously difficult as Gourmet Paradise was limp. Simply getting through the first stage can be a test of skill and patience, as the game world is populated by deadly foes who pursue poor Fish Dude and will devour him aggressively.

Here’s a basic breakdown of the action: You control a tiny fish swimming around through underwater mazes, attempting to devour a set number of tinier fishes so you can grow to your next evolutionary state or whatever. Meanwhile, you need to dodge ravenous larger fish—there’s always a bigger fish—who hope to eat you in turn. It’s kind of like Pac-Man, except brutally difficult; the camera viewpoint is zoomed in extremely close to the action, and everything moves at a rapid clip, which means enemies can appear from off-screen be on top of you within a split second.

To make things even more difficult, it takes Fish Dude a moment to gulp down his victims, leaving you motionless and defensive as you masticate. If you accidentally bump into a little fish while evading a bigger one, you’re basically dead, as your jaw flaps pathetically on your unwanted meal. While you can technically spit out a fish without eating it to save time, everything happens so quickly there may be no room to do so.

You can also evade big fish by leaping out of the water, but this mechanic also falls athwart of the zoomed-in viewpoint. Seagulls and boats (crewed by hungry kittens) patrol the surface of the water, and the cramped camera means that you may not realize danger lurks above until you’ve leapt from the water and it’s too late.

The premise of eating enemies to grow to the next stage has been explored in quite a few other games, such as E.V.O. for Super NES, Cubivore for GameCube, and the early phases of Will Wright’s magnificent flop Spore. It’s never been done as unremarkably as it is here, though. The growth mechanic actually works to your detriment: The further you venture into the game, the larger Fish Dude grows. This leaves you less room for evasion and makes it harder to slip between narrow spaces to safety. This is kind of a clever idea, but in practice it also works out to be kind of frustrating. 

It’s worth noting, though, that Fish Dude does offer players one advantage: You have a friend in the form of octopuses that live in several of the stages. When you bump into an octopus, you’ll cause the screen colors to invert—presumably to represent ink being sprayed into the water—and while the screen is scrambled, you’re briefly safe from the big fish.

Finally, the gameplay changes for the ninth and final stage. Here, Fish Dude becomes what the manual refers to as a “death match” wherein it’s just you and a few big fish swimming around trying to avoid a human diver while turning the tables on your foes. If you can chomp a big fish’s tail here, you can eat it. Gulp down three of them and you win, game over, with the option to play again at an even higher difficulty level.

And that’s the entirety of this game. Not much, right? It’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s also nothing to write home about. Certainly not the kind of game that should cost upwards of $50 on the after market for the cartridge alone. But, well, that’s the thing about Fish Dude.  It’s wildly expensive because who would have bought this game back in the day? It has a terrible name, unengaging box art, a middling premise, and hails from a trio of almost completely unknown, under-the-radar corporations.

So far as I can tell, its reputed developer, Salio, produced a grand total of four games in the course of its brief existence on this earth. The most interesting thing about those four games is that two of them were licensed from Tecmo and comprised the only two third-party titles ever to be published on SEGA’s Mark III console, the Japanese equivalent of the Master System: Argus no Juujiken (aka Rygar) and Solomon’s Key. Fish Dude would be the company’s fourth and final creation.

Japanese publisher Towa Chiki we’ve seen already on Game Boy Works as the company behind the perfectly mundane classic board game adaptation Taikyoku Renju [see Game Boy Works Vol. I]. As with Salio, Fish Dude would be the final video game from Towa Chiki, too.

In fact, the only company that appears to have survived the creation of Fish Dude was U.S. publisher Sofel, one of the forgotten nobodies of the 8-bit era. Sofel is probably best known for the Casino Kid games, which have a decent reputation among NES fans. After releasing Fish Dude here, the company’s U.S. branch would go on to publish Z-tier NES titles KlashBall and Dragon Fighter, as well as TKO Super Championship Boxing for Super NES. Soon after that, however, the company retreated back to Japan-only publishing before fading from existence from even that market a few years later.

There’s really nothing happy in the Fish Dude legacy. It’s an unremarkable game created by doomed companies, and you can expect to pay dearly for the questionable privilege of playing it. About the only thing Fish Dude really has going for it is the fact that its U.S. branding and marketing are the platonic ideal of the garbage The Simpsons would make fun of a few years later with “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.” 

Sadly, Salio died on the way back to its home planet.