Jaws Unleashed (PS2)

Although the 1975 film Jaws has had a lasting impact on pop culture (for better or worse), the film has had a number of product tie-ins over the decades, including in the video game space. While a handful of home console games exist, one that had caught my interest in particular was the 2006 game Jaws Unleashed, as while I wasn’t quite old enough to actually play it at the time, the idea of playing as the shark had always intrigued me, in spite of its reception. In the years since, I was reminded of this game by the existence of the game Maneater, which features a similar concept, and was recently lucky enough to find a wild PS2 copy of Jaws Unleashed. While I had been wanting to play the game anyway, this year being the 50^th anniversary of the original film provided motivation to finally boot it up for the first time. Although I found the expansion on the Jaws world interesting, the game unfortunately shows some age with the flawed execution of its gameplay.

Jaws

Fifty years ago, Jaws made a huge splash in the cinematic landscape and its ripple effects are still felt to this day. Shortly after its original release in 1975, it thrashed box office records and became the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of the original Star Wars just two years later and even surfaced to a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. Such a feat put Steven Spielberg, who had based the film off of the bestselling Peter Benchley novel of the same name, on the map and led to a lucrative career that made him a household name. Even now, Jaws is often regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, as well as perhaps the only good Shark movie ever made. It also can’t be understated how much of an impact it had on Hollywood filmmaking and society at large, for better or worse.

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of such a monumental film, we did our due diligence and gave Jaws another watch (with a twenty-five-year-old DVD to boot). After all, films this old may not have held up as well as its reputation would suggest. However, not only has Jaws held up surprisingly well after a few decades, its reputation feels more than earned and it’s easy to see how it still serves as a continuous source of inspiration.