Fathom
Platform: Intellivision
Region: USA
Media: Cartridge
Controller: INTV
Genre: Action
Gametype: Licensed
Release Year: 1983
Developer: Imagic
Publisher: Imagic
Players: 1
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Neptina, Neptune's daughter, has been imprisoned at the bottom of the sea by Titans. Your goal is to rescue her by locating the scattered pieces of a magical trident! You will need to take the form of a dolphin and a bird in order to locate the pieces that are hidden in the ocean and clouds. When flying in the air, there are several screens that have clouds flying by. Touch all of the clouds, and the trident piece appears! Other birds which are flying around will cause you to lose energy if you touch them accidentally. Underwater, trident pieces can be found by touching the sea horses. Octopuses, sharks, and a deadly maze of seaweed will get in your way and cause you to lose energy if caught! When you have located all of the trident pieces, the cage holding Neptina can be unlocked, but if you run out of energy first the game will be over.


DEVELOPMENT HISTORY:

Programmer Dave Durran had worked at Mattel Electronics on the hardware designs of the Intellivision Master and Keyboard Components and Intellivoice before leaving to join the startup Imagic. At Imagic he wrote much of the system code used in game development and worked on the hardware design of the Imagic cartridge ROMs. He also wrote the sound effects for the games.

With everything else he was working on, he says that writing Fathom was a "kind of afterthought." It was designed to be a children's game with (mostly) friendly characters and an easily understood goal. The theme is the same as Imagic's Atari 2600 Fathom designed by Rob Fulop, but the gameplay is slightly different.

Imagic later released a version of Fathom for ColecoVision.


EXPERTS CLUB PERFORMANCE STANDARD:

Fathom was released after the final Numb Thumb newsletter, so no performance standard was published for the game.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/intellivision/fathom
http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/imagic.html#fathom
