Air-Sea Battle involves the player controlling a gun to shoot down various targets to earn points in different themed areas.

Sears published Air-Sea Battle as Target Fun and used it as the pack-in game for its Tele-Games rebranding of the Atari VCS.

The "Bomber" and "Polaris" games have the players ship moving in constant motion at the top of the playfield or at the bottom respectively.

By 1977, this set-up was change dto a PDP-11 machines which featured monitors and floppy disk drives which would speed up game development.

At the request of Sears, Kaplan changed what were once dogs into rabbits for the "Shooting Gallery Games" mode.

[7] While working on Air-Sea Battle, Kaplan developed a method of moving player objects more than once during a single frame of the picture, despite the ability to do this not being part of the system's initial design.

When trying to complete work on the game, Kaplan tried to give the computer controlled opponent Artificial intelligence.

As he was only given two kilobytes (KB) for the final ROM cartridge, he only had the opponent fire continuously, which Kaplan referred to as "silly and not fun at all.

[8][6] According to Weekly Television Digest from October 17, 1977, the Atari VCS was shipped to all major market areas by August 1977.

[14][15] It was included in portable gaming compilations such as the Atari Greatest Hits for Nintendo DS and iOS-based smartphones.

[16][17] From contemporary reviews, Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz (under the name Frank T. Laney II) wrote in Video magazine, declaring it "the ultimate game for people who enjoy blowing things up".

"[25] In the same magazine, Kunkel and Bill Laney, Jr. echoed this statement saying the game was an "instant classic" on its release and was still a "remarkably fine videogame" in 1981.

[26] In Electronic Games two Software Encyclopedia issues from 1983, the review complimented the graphics such as the shades of blue in sky and the gameplay such as allowing players to steer missiles.

[27] Reviews decades after the games release includes Skyler Miller of AllGame stating that Air-Sea Battle's sound and graphics were plain, while generally praising the game as simple, addictive and fun and best-played with human second player.