Shark! Shark!

Shark! Shark! was an elegant, universal concept: you controlled a tiny fish eating smaller fish to grow, avoiding bigger ones that ate you. The shark dominated the ocean — huge, fast, lethal — but you could bite its tail for bonus points (risking your life). As you grew, previously deadly fish became prey. The predator-prey cycle was hypnotic. Intellivision's 8 simultaneous sprites made the ocean alive and chaotic. Don Daglow (Utopia's creator) built a playable ecosystem anticipating concepts from games like Flow and Feeding Frenzy by twenty years.