It was originally slated to be the flagship product in Hasbro's Control-Vision video game system, which would use VHS tapes as its medium.

However, Hasbro cancelled the Control-Vision platform, and Digital Pictures later developed the game for the Sega CD expansion unit.

Sewer Shark takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where environmental destruction has forced most of humanity to live underground.

The objective of Sewer Shark is to travel all the way from the home base to Solar City without crashing or running out of energy, and while maintaining a satisfactory level of performance as judged by Ghost and Commissioner Stenchler.

As in other rail shooters, the ship mostly flies itself, leaving the player to shoot ratigators (mutant crosses between rats and alligators), bats, giant scorpions and mechanical moles.

Sewer Shark is often referred to as an interactive movie due to its use of full motion video to convey the action, and the navigation aspect of the game is frequently compared to Dragon's Lair, since turns are gates that the player must pass through to continue playing.

To work within the console's limitations, the developers wrote a custom video codec to highly compress the data streams so they could be read in realtime from the CD.

Digital Pictures president Tom Zito has identified Rob Fulop, Kenneth Melville, and Charlie Kelner as the three main creative minds behind Sewer Shark.

And with the promise of movie-quality pictures, audiophile sound, and fast frames-per-second animation, CD-ROM figures to be the shape of games to come.

[14] Power Unlimited gave a score of 78%, writing: "Sewer Shark is another interactive movie that took advantage of the capabilities of the Sega CD.