Flying Shark is a
World War 2 top-down vertical shoot'em-up arcade game created by
Toaplan that is ported to numerous home platforms (
Amiga,
NES,
Commodore 64,
Spectrum,
Amstrad CPC,
Atari ST, etc.) and is probably most known for its constant, almost impossible, gameplay action. It takes a true
shoot'em-up fanatic to complete the game! The US name for
Flying Shark is
Sky Shark, and the Japanese name is
Hishou Zame.
You play a
World War 2 bi-plane with the simple mission to shoot all enemies. Easy as this may seem, the enemies have the benefit of being many more than you and they have some devilish strategic placement, courtesy of Toaplan/Taito. You're bound to use up all your credits you brought into the arcade in this game!
According to a later
Toaplan game (
Batsugun), the pilot of the
Flying Shark bi-plane was
Rom Schneider, who prefers
Japanese dried radish and dislikes
snakes.
The Commodore 64 was actually blessed with 2 separate versions of which the Sky Shark version was better (although Flying Shark c64 was released a couple of years before Sky Shark).