Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:
"When I first started Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog a little over three years ago I honestly wasn't 100% sure how long it'd take for me to finish it, or even if I would actually finish it. However, we're now down to the final stretch... and while all prior parts of this series required multiple entries to cover a single calendar year, our next & final part will kind of feel like a whirlwind."
In 2021 RetroHQ released the Jaguar GameDrive, a microSD card-driven flash cart that allowed one to play just about any game ever released for Atari Corporation's final console, including Jaguar CD games without needing the actual accessory (though compatibility still isn't quite 100% there, last I checked), opening up the console's catalog to anyone who owned an actual Jaguar console but didn't want to spend the exorbitant prices for many of its more cherished & rare titles. Since I happen to own a "Jag" I decided that the GameDrive would be perfect for me, turning my console into essentially an "All-in-One" device... and that put a thought into my head. Inspired by much more talented people than me, namely the likes of Jeremy Parish's "Works Series" & PandaMonium's "PandaMonium Reviews Every U.S. Saturn Game" (which both tackle console catalogs in chronological order of release), I decided to take a look at the Atari Jaguar's own catalog release history; at only 50 officially licensed games it felt reasonably doable. Instead of tackling it one release at a time in immense depth, like Parish or Panda, I decided to bundle them together in batches of four or five (& later a couple of trios, due to later changes in release order being unearthed), which I felt was fair enough. Starting with my look at the original test launch line-up in late 1993 on June 6, 2021 I have since spent the past 3.5 years occasionally returning to this series, and while I initially planned it out as an 11-part series, some later revelations about a more accurate release schedule made me change it into a 12-part series (& it'll technically be 13, since there'll be a final thoughts piece after this), but I have finally made it to the end.
Atari Corporation may be long dead (at least, in the form it was when it first launched the console), but the Atari Jaguar itself has continued to live on to this very day... so let's prowl the catalog one last time & see how things fared between the years 1997 & 2001.
Anyway, despite the Jaguar itself being a barely-supported console by this point, February 1997 would see the release of the second & final CoJag arcade game, Atari Games' Maximum Force. Developed by the same team at Mesa Logic that developed Area 51 two years prior, Maximum Force was another rail gun shooter that relied on 2D digitized actors on top of 3D CG environments, only this time the theme was about engaging in counter-terrorism actions; also like Area 51 there would be ports to the PlayStation, Saturn, & PC, but not the Jaguar itself. The following month in March would see the launch of the Nintendo 64 in both Europe & Australasia, making that console available in all of the major regions. Finally, the Jaguar would see a new release on April 29, 1997... but we won't be covering this specific one here, as it was Iron Soldier 2 for the Jaguar CD from Telegames; it would later receive a cartridge release, and we'll cover that release a bit later. One day later, though, Sega would officially discontinue the Game Gear handheld system, the closest competitor Nintendo's Game Boy ever had (though even its sales were only, at best, 1/10 of the Game Boy's) & the only handheld to truly "challenge" Nintendo's dominance until Sony's PSP in 2004. Things would then return to nothingness for the Jag throughout May 1997, though at some point during that month SNK would quietly discontinue the Neo Geo CD, though SNK would continue new official releases through 1999, with its final two NGCD releases being The Last Blade 2 (which only saw release in Japan, but had the English version on the disc) & The King of Fighters '99 (which actually did see an official English release).
Finally, we reach June 1997, which sees the first new cartridge release for the Jaguar since last December! Prior to that Telegames would release World Tour Racing on June 4, which would become the final official release for the Jaguar CD, but for this final entry our focus is on AirCars, which came out on June 18. Despite coming out so late, this was actually a super early game put into production for the Jaguar, as MidNite Entertainment Group was one of the earliest third-party developers to sign on the Jag, after having previously developed ports of Food Fight & Airball for Atari's 8-bit computers, as well as later porting both Hard Drivin' & Ninja Gaiden III to the Lynx. Originally announced as "Car Wars", AirCars was first planned as a second quarter 1994 release & be the first game to support the CatBox, a peripheral that allowed for multi-console LAN play (as well as offer additional A/V outputs), but both the game & the CatBox got delayed to early 1995, which is also when AirCars got its final title. It was shown both at the 1995 Winter CES (where poor reception resulted in yet another delay) & E3 1995 (where it was considered "nearly complete"), but due to lukewarm press reception at E3 & financial problems MidNite wound up cancelling AirCars' then-final July 1995 release entirely, despite the game being finished & even passing certification; the CatBox, though, seemed to still come out that year. The trademark for the game would then get abandoned in 1996, which is when the company ICD (which produced the CatBox) acquired the rights to AirCars & finally released it. However, despite technically being an officially licensed release for the Jaguar, ICD only made 200 copies of AirCars & didn't even make an outer box for the packaging, instead simply shrink-wrapping the manual, cartridge, & cartridge holding inner box; today this release is considered a holy grail for Jaguar collectors.
In 2003 the company B&C ComputerVisions (which looks to still be around as an Atari-focused eBay store!) acquired the rights to a few of ICD's products, including AirCars, & released cartridge-only reproductions, though I imagine this was similarly limited in scale. Since then the Atari fan community have found & released both a prototype version (now known as AirCars '94) as well as a version that was submitted for an ESRB rating (now known as KA AirCars, after the old K-A rating, now the E rating), which both feature their own differences from the original ICD release. However, I'll just be judging this based on that original release... so was AirCars truly worth all this hassle? To put it simply, not really, but it's also not a bad game. The simplest way to describe AirCars is "Hover Strike, Only Not as Good" as the two play very similarly on a general conceptual level. The main campaign here is simply about taking out all of the "Primary Targets" in each level, upon which a "gate" opens that will finish the level & take you to the next one. Meanwhile there are general "Targets" to destroy alongside the expected enemy gun emplacements, tanks, & other AirCars that you don't have to destroy but will often drop pick-ups of various kinds (new weapons, ammo, upgrades, etc.) & get tallied in total across each completion screen after you beat each level. However, there's none of the subtle details that Hover Strike had to be found here, as while movement is similarly momentum-based & kind of tank-like, the most you can do is fire from either side of your AirCar, instead of the actual tank-like controls of Hover Strike. Also, the game is simultaneously hard & easy, as it can be immensely easy to find yourself in a situation where you're mostly helpless against nonstop enemy fire & get destroyed... but the game gives you unlimited lives, with the only caveat being that you respawn in a random location... which can sometimes mean that you respawn right in front of enemies that instantly start shooting at you. Also, you'll quickly get annoyed by the constant voice saying "[Primary] Target Destroyed" over & over & over; people joke about "Where did you learn to fly?" from Cybermorph, but AirCars has it much worse. To be fair, I would imagine that AirCars would truly shine in multiplayer, as via the JagLink you play through the campaign in co-op, while the CatBox allows for up to eight-player LAN deathmatch, and that admittedly sounds really neat for a Jaguar game, even in mid-1997. However, considering its rarity and status as a "Holy Grail" for Jag collectors, AirCars really is nothing more than a curiosity today, as while it's nowhere near as terrible as Jag's worst, you can easily play something much, much better that was developed by Atari itself & came out two years prior in Hover Strike (though, to be fair, the two games were finished around the same time).
About two months after AirCars finally saw its limited release, a new handheld came out in August... Tiger Electronic's Game.com (pronounced "Game com"; yeah, I know). Even back at release it was considered a bit of a laughing stock, despite being ahead of the time in some small ways (touch screen, a form of internet connectivity, & two cartridge slots), but most embarrassing of all? The Game.com still sold more units than the Jaguar with "fewer than 300,000" being the closest estimate, which is still likely more than the 250,000 Jaguar consoles that were produced, in total. The Game.com also technically outlived the Jag, at least when it came to official support, not being discontinued until 2000; that's just sad.
Meanwhile, Telegames wouldn't release its next cartridge-based Jaguar game until September 29, nine whole months after Breakout 2000 & Towers II, with the release of Zero 5. Similar to Breakout 2000, Zero 5 was yet another game that had been in development for a while as an officially licensed release under Atari Corp. before things obviously changed. In this case, Zero 5 was actually a remake of Caspian Software's Atari STe computer game of the same name from 1994, becoming one of the last official releases for that platform, and Atari Corp. was impressed enough to sign Caspian on board as a part of Atari UK's effort to work with European devs to produce more Jaguar games; see Attack of the Mutant Penguins from 1996 Part 1 for more info about that initiative. According to Caspain programmer Matthew Gosling, Zero 5 had "the lowest development budget of any Jaguar product at the time" and that, despite having been in development as late as August 1995 & initially scheduled for a November release later that year, the version of the game that was given to Telegames for release in 1997 was unfinished, plus none of the team at Caspian ever received payment for the development; after being unable to get a PS1 port off the ground Caspian Software disbanded. Despite all of that, though, Zero 5 was mostly praised by the gaming press in 1997, as while the minimally-textured polygonal visuals were received more mixed just about everyone loved the fast gameplay & strong techno music, though the high difficulty was a common complaint. Time to see how Zero 5 fares 27 years later...
Zero 5 is a game based around only 15 missions split up into five sets of three, & each of the three have their own unique gameplay styles. Every first mission is "BamBam Mode", a sort of 3D Galaga-esque shooter, but specifically the bonus stages, where you face off against waves of enemies that circle around & occasionally shoot back at you, and destroying an entire wave nets you a power up, and you can decide what that power up goes to by pressing 1, 2, or 3 on the keypad; 1 is for powering up your attack, 2 is for replenishing your health, & 3 is simply for bonus points. However, while it looks to be a six-degrees-of-freedom game, complete with the ability to roll your space ship, you actually don't move around the screen. Instead, you stay as the focal point of the screen & simply spin around that point, meaning that sometimes the camera will pull out & enemies will actually appear in the front of the screen, obscuring your ship! Your goal here is to simply survive the onslaught of enemies, and you have access to three homing laser shots to use like bombs when in an emergency. Every second mission is "Hit-Pak Mode", which plays like a turret-based rail shooter where the only thing you control is the on-screen reticle as you shoot down any & all enemies that appear on screen, and you have full 360° to rotate around, though no ability to look up or down; no power ups are found in this mission. Finally, every third mission is "BamBam Trench Mode", where you throttle down a trench in order to reach a reactor & blow it up, Star Wars-style, using the sound of your shots hitting walls to tell which ones can be destroyed & which ones to avoid; power ups are here, but are now gained by flying over flashing panels. To be honest, at first I didn't really enjoy Zero 5, and that's mainly because it's both a game where the power up system really does require you to read the manual first to fully understand, as it's not self-explanatory, & the default medium difficulty is a terrible way to get started, as you have literally half the health as normal... and hard is exactly the same, only with longer levels! Once I understood how BamBam Mode played, & lowered the difficulty to easy (which really should be the default, honestly), I had a much better time, though it's still flawed.
Simply put, BamBam Mode is an intriguing take on an old-school shooter, but the fixed camera only really works for Mission 1, where the enemy waves are simple & straightforward. The moment you hit Mission 4, which introduces more complex waves & patterns, that mode becomes a bit of a chore. I imagine Hit-Pak simply gets tougher with more enemies to fight & BamBam Trench becomes even more hectic with its speed & barrier evasion, but both of those have perfectly fine cameras to work with. Overall, Zero 5 is a game that did grow on me as I learned how to properly play it... only for its first gameplay mode to showcase its biggest flaw the moment I finished the first loop, and I didn't feel like doing it all over again four more times; it's still a damn good game on the Jag, though, as two-thirds of it are honestly always fun.
The Jaguar's final 1997 release, & the console's penultimate official release in general, would come out a month after Zero 5 in the form of Iron Soldier 2 on October 31. As mentioned near the start of this entry, this sequel to the 1994 original by Eclipse Software (which returned for this game) first came out earlier in 1997 as a Jaguar CD game, as Atari Corp. initially hired Eclipse to make a sequel specifically to act as a killer app for the Jag CD. However, programmer Marc Rosocha later admitted that Iron Soldier 2 was always made as a cartridge-sized ROM from the very beginning for the sole purpose of avoiding load times, since the game could now fit into the Jag's internal memory, & the only difference between the two versions was that CD release included some FMV cutscenes & redbook audio music; in fact, the CD version was originally planned for February 1997, but replication issues delayed it to April. Eclipse put a lot of work into this sequel, even discovering a way to exploit the Jag's color palette memory to double the texture buffering speed, allowing for large-scale textures to be applied without lowering performance; there were even plans for a two-player JagLink option, but it was removed from the final version. Naturally, Eclipse eventually got worried about whether Iron Soldier 2 would see release, especially after talking with Attention to Detail (the studio behind Cybermorph & Battlemorph), but despite being assured by Atari Corp. that it would see it release, & primary development finished in early 1996, it was put on indefinite hiatus. That fall Telegames contacted Rosocha about publishing Iron Soldier 2, which resulted in Rosocha needing to spend the next three months testing it like crazy & fixing as many errors as he could find, as he was the only remaining staff as Eclipse who understood the source code for it, which is what allowed the final release on both CD & later cartridge; Rosocha would later admit that developing for both formats also delayed the release, in general. I found the original Iron Soldier to be an excellent game early on in the Jag's life, so time to see if the sequel carried on that excellence in the Jag's twilight.
Similar to the first game, Iron Soldier 2's campaign is made up of four sets of missions, only this time it's now four sets of five (20 stages) instead of four of four (16), and you can play a set of missions in any order you want. Said missions tend to primarily be about destroying specific buildings or enemy forces, but there are also some defensive missions that see you protecting buildings, convoys, & the like. In terms of general gameplay this sequel plays more or less exactly like the original, so the keypad is essential here as the buttons match your giant robot's shoulders, hips, & arms for weaponry (& with the Pro controller you can swap to hips & arms via the shoulder buttons & upper row of face buttons, respectively), and as you destroy buildings you can come across new weapons that you can then equip after finishing the mission you found it on. Outside of that the main difference is really in the new enemy forces you have to deal with, most notably carpet bombing jets (which seem to have no problems destroying buildings for you, if you place yourself just right), missile emplacements that can do heavy damage to you quickly, & the "Satyr walker" that pretty much looks like the AT-ST from Star Wars (& can even be played as via a code!). Even reviews at the time called out Iron Soldier 2 as playing more or less exactly like the original, with very little to "warrant" it being a sequel, but the biggest complaint comes in the difficulty. Simply out, Iron Soldier 2 is hard as nails from the very start, and it's very easy to find yourself swarmed with foes, plus the occasional carpet bombing making things even more fun (for them, I mean). Thankfully, Eclipse got rid of the first game's utterly stupid "No saving until you complete a set of missions" restriction, as now you can save after completing each mission, which I guess makes the added difficulty a little more doable.
Simply put, Iron Soldier 2 is pretty much just more Iron Soldier... and that's not exactly a bad thing. The first game is awesome & so is the sequel, even with the difficulty being amped up here, and I would argue that after three years Jag owners likely would have simply been happy to get more Iron Soldier back in the day. Eclipse would then move on to develop a third game, Iron Soldier 3, for the PS1 that almost got published by Sony itself, but would wind up being co-published by Telegames & Vatical Entertainment in 2000, right down to there literally being two different print runs, one for each publisher's logo on the cover; this game would finally add in split screen multiplayer, for both co-op & versus. Eclipse also made a version of Iron Soldier 3 with enhanced visuals for Nuon-compatible DVD players that came out in 2001 & has even received a modern limited production reprint in 2021.
Moving on, later that December SNK officially discontinued the Neo Geo, at least when it came to producing more MVS & AES hardware, though due to the successor Hyper Neo Geo 64 failing spectacularly SNK would have to continue relying on producing new games for the older hardware for the next seven years, even after SNK itself eventually went bankrupt in 2001. With that we end 1997 & move into 1998, which saw the CoJag return to arcades one last time, at some point, with a cabinet that contained both Area 51 & Maximum Force, while that same year Atari Games released Area 51: Site 4, a sequel that played more or less the same as the original game but instead of Jaguar-based hardware it ran off of PC-based hardware. However, while the Jaguar's time in arcades was short-lived, the console itself would manage to outlive NEC's PC-FX, the Japan-exclusive successor to the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 that debuted in late 1994 & pretty much instantly bombed, with NEC discontinuing the PC-FX (& leaving the hardware business entirely) sometime in February 1998; however, the PC-FX still outsold the Jaguar with 300,000 units.
It's at this point that yet another era for the Jaguar came to an end, as sometime between February 23 & March 13 (a definitive date has seemingly never been clarified) JT Storage decided to sell all that it owned of the Atari brand & its IPs to Hasbro Interactive, the video game division of toy company monolith Hasbro. Despite getting much-needed money from Atari via the merger, & even securing $25 million in investments a few months prior in September 1997, JTS was pretty much bleeding money by this point, & Hasbro wound up buying everything Atari that JTS had for a cool $5 million, less than 1/5 of the $28 million Warner Communications paid for Atari, Inc. back in 1976, not to mention being only 1/50 of the $240 million in stock Warner sold the future Atari Corp. to Jack Tramiel for in 1984. As for the still-living Atari Games, on April 6, 1998 WMS Industries would spin-off its video game assets into its own separate company, Midway Games (the first time in ~30 years Midway was independently owned), and Atari Games would continue on as a subsidiary of that company. For the time being, there were still technically two different entities named "Atari" in the video game business, only now each was owned by a wholly different company that what originally owned them, respectively.
To be perfectly honest, it just doesn't sound like any sort of logical sense to see the year "1998" & expect another officially licensed Atari Jaguar game to see release, especially now that Hasbro owns the rights to everything "Atari" when it comes to home consoles... and yet here we are. On May 15, 1998 Telegames released Worms for the Jaguar, a port of Team17's iconic turn-based tactical artillery combat game originally created by hobbyist programmer Andy Davidson under the name Total Wormage. When Team17 was shown this title by Davidson at a trade show in the UK the decision was made instantly for it to be made available on as many different pieces of hardware as possible, and not simply for the Amiga, so when Worms first launched in late 1995 it was on the Amiga (both PC & CD-32; Europe-only), MS-DOS, Game Boy (Europe-only), PlayStation (initially Europe-only), & Mega Drive (Europe-only), while in 1996 & 1997 it saw ports to the SNES (Europe-only), Saturn, Mac, & international releases for the PS1 version. 1997 also saw the release of Worms: The Director's Cut, which was Davidson's personal farewell to the Amiga by creating essentially the ultimate version of the game; unfortunately, Jag Worms looks to be a port of the OG version. In fact, by the time the Jag finally saw its own port of Worms the game's sequel, Worms 2, had already been released on PC in both North America & Europe that same year, and just a year later would see the release of Worms Armageddon, which is generally considered the best overall entry in the entire franchise! In that regard the Jaguar port of Worms was kind of a game lost to time, released on a console that itself was kind of stuck in that same conundrum, but does the beloved game at least fare well on Atari's (now Hasbro's?) final console?
For anyone unfamiliar, Worms is a game that exemplifies the adage of "easy to learn, hard to master". Simply put, the goal is for your team of worms to be the last team standing by taking out all other teams' worms (between one to three opposing teams) using all manner of weapons, including bazookas, grenades (both standard & cluster), dynamite, shotguns, uzis, airstrikes, both the "Dragon Ball" & "Fire Punch", and even exploding sheep. Teams take turns one worm/team at a time, and even when playing by yourself you can fight AI-controlled teams that can range from a decent challenge to "can thread the needle with a bazooka round every turn". Environments in Worms are randomly generated for each battle, though if there's one you really liked you can jot down the code for it & manually input it before any battle. Finally, you have full customization before fighting, whether that be deciding which weapons can be used, how many "rounds" have to be won to win the set, & so on. Beyond that... there really isn't much else to Worms in terms of content, as while there is a "league" of sorts to play as a part of there is no real single-player campaign, so the game itself is really nothing more than battles between worm teams. Thankfully there's nothing wrong with that, because Worms was, is, & forever will be awesome. The basic gameplay that Andy Davidson came up with is so simple to just pick & play, even if all you use is the bazooka (& take advantage of the wind to fine tune your shots), and once you start taking full advantage of the various weapons & tools you have at your disposal the game's true depth starts to show, resulting in literally no two matches ever playing out the same. Sure, even by May of 1998 the first Worms game had already become outdated, but the fact that the Jag got this game is awesome, in & of itself, and the fact that it would wind up being the final "official" release for the console is a neat little feather in its cap.
But, yeah... just play Worms, on just about any type of hardware, because it's excellent.
I had originally planned for this entire series to end with Worms, as that is technically the 50th & final officially licensed cartridge-based Jaguar game ever released... but I decided to add one more game to the mix, and before we get to that point we have to first go over what Hasbro wound up doing as the new steward of the Atari name & branding (at least, for the home market). First, Hasbro still saw value in the Atari name & brand, much more so than its own name when it came to video games (which it only continued using for board game adaptations & the like), so on October 23, 1998 it debuted Atari Interactive (the label itself was announced in May at E3, but wasn't actually used on releases until this point), and the first game released under this branding would be a brand new Centipede game, one done using 3D polygons, which first saw release on PC, fulfilling what Atari Corp. itself couldn't back in early 1996 with its aborted PC label of the same name; it'd then get ported to PS1 & Sega Dreamcast in 1999. Speaking of the Dreamcast, that console would see it's Japanese launch on November 27, 1998, two months before January 28, 1999, which was the day JT Storage entered Chapter 7 liquidation following an initial attempt at Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection the month prior; JTS had a reported $4.2 million in assets & $136 million in liabilities. The Atari brand managed to avoid getting lost in the shuffle of bankruptcy by getting sold off to Hasbro, which in the long-term would wind up being for the better by all regards... but Hasbro had no interest in being anything more than a third-party video game publisher, and while the company still allowed Worms to see release on the Jaguar (as it had likely been officially approved by JTS prior to the sale, so Hasbro was simply honoring a pre-existing agreement), it really had no future in mind for the Jag.
At the same time, though, Hasbro did see that there was still a dedicated fanbase for the console & didn't want to have to potentially become a roadblock for those fans to continue seeing new releases. Therefore, on May 14, 1999 Hasbro put out a press release announcing that "it has released all rights that it may have to the vintage Atari hardware platform, the Jaguar", & that it "will allow software developers to create and publish software for the Jaguar system without having to obtain a licensing agreement with Hasbro Interactive for such platform development", with the only restriction from Hasbro being "that the developers should not use the Atari trademark or logo in connection with their games or present the games as authorized or approved by Hasbro Interactive". While other consoles have since seen new games released for them in an obviously unofficial manner, & even the Atari 2600 had already seen some homebrew releases since 1995, I believe this is the literal only time that a video game company has ever officially declared one of its consoles as being an open platform; by that logic any Jaguar release after Worms could technically be considered "official", but I won't go that far.
So, with Hasbro now free of needing to deal with any potential future Jaguar matters, Atari Interactive continued on with its next release, The Next Tetris, on May 31; Hasbro only published the PS1 & (off all things) Nuon versions. After that the gaming world unknowingly said farewell to Atari Games with what would be its final arcade release under that moniker, San Francisco Rush 2049, the following month in June; I've also seen September 1999 as the release date. Speaking of September, the next major hardware moment would happen on the legendary "9/9/99" with the North American launch of the Dreamcast, a console that Hasbro/Atari Interactive would support to some extent. Then, on October 31, Atari Interactive returned with its next new game, Pong: The Next Level, which did like Centipede the year prior & reimagined the OG arcade classic from the 70s using polygons & various forms of Pong to play. A few days later, on November 3, Atari Interactive would then release what was easily its most bizarre game... Nerf Arena Blast, a PC-exclusive competitive FPS featuring Nerf-branded products inspired by Quake III: Arena & Unreal Tournament, even going so far as using the original Unreal Engine!
Anyway, about two weeks after that, on November 19, Atari Games got renamed to Midway Games West, thereby ending the usage of a name dating back to 1985. This was honestly understandable as Atari Corp. was no longer an entity in any form & I imagine Midway Games didn't want to potentially get into a trademark dispute with Hasbro Interactive; Midway Games West would continue on until early 2003, producing four more games & console ports of Rush 2049. A little over a week later, on November 30, Atari Interactive would release two more polygonal re-imaginings of arcade classics, this time Missile Command & Q*bert (the latter under license from its owner, Columbia Pictures). Next, before we get to the truly last game to cover in this series, the "modern era" of Jaguar releases finally began on December 20, 1999, when Minnesota-based Songbird Productions (founded by "well-known Atari fan and hobby developer" Carl Forhan) released Protector, the very first Jaguar game to see release after Hasbro's open platform declaration. Originally in development at Bethesda Softworks (so, yes, Todd Howard's name is actually on a Jaguar game), Protector was fully playable way back in March 1995, but Atari Corp. refused to publish it, fearing it would compete with Defender 2000 due to how similar they played, & Bethesda decided to simply cancel development, due to the Jag's poor performance on the market. After seeing programmer Jørgen Bech discuss his time working on the game on a Usenet forum in 1998, Forhan then managed to secure a license from Bethesda to finally release Protector, finishing up development on it & showcasing it at the very first Classic Gaming Expo in August 1999 (the founders of which would later establish the National Videogame Museum in 2014), before finally releasing it at the end of the year; it's since seen multiple updated versions released by Songbird, both on cartridge & CD.
While Protector was originally in development during the time when Atari Corp. was active & officially licensing titles for release, I decided to not go with this title to end off Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog. Why? Because the next "modern era" Jaguar release (following a port of 1993's Soccer Kid by Songbird on February 2, 2000) was one that Atari Corp. was much more directly involved with originally!
Look, there were a lot of Atari Jaguar games that wound up never seeing the light of day, almost as many in development or planning that actually saw release before this final entry, and Atari Corporation had its direct hands in more than a few of them, to say the least. One of those games was BattleSphere, which was in development at a studio called 4Play, initially Phalanx Software. Originally conceived back in August 1993, 4Play were interested in developing for the Jaguar & got into contact with Atari Corp., pitching their game (at first called "Singularity") as an update of the 1980 classic Star Raiders. Atari approved the pitch as an "in-house project" & development began in 1994, now under the title "Star Battle". The devs, including CatBox designer Tom Harker, initially had full-time jobs so they developed the game on the side, planning for a 12-18-month schedule. However, an uncooperative Atari Corp., among other issues, slowed things down before the team was able to focus on development full-time in July 1995, which is when the BattleSphere name became official. During the continued development Atari Corp. would merge with JT Storage, followed by Hasbro buying the rights to Atari, & apparently Hasbro even approved BattleSphere for binary encryption! However, the approval was never done in writing, so 4Play had to use encryption hacking software to encode the ROM image, while Harker left the studio in mid-1998 & development itself finished in July. Apparently, it was 4Play's Doug Engel that actually convinced Hasbro to declare the Jaguar an open platform in 1999, and that's what finally allowed BattleSphere to see release on February 29, 2000, with the remaining staff forming the label ScatoLOGIC (not sure if they simply didn't know what that word actually implied...) to release it; it was initially sold via eBay, & the devs promised to donate all profits from sales to charity. So, after three-plus years of prowling, it's time to finally bring it all to a resolution with BattleSphere & see if it was worth it all, in the end; to clarify, I'm going off of BattleSphere Gold, the 2002 update of the game.
As you can tell from the set up & the above screen shot, BattleSphere is a space-based flight sim, similar in style to something like Wing Commander or Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. The game itself is split up across five main gameplay modes, which can be played single-player or via LAN play. "Alone Against the Empires" is the traditional single-player mode where you're tasked with fighting against foes across 64 quadrants, similar to how Star Raiders made players have to plan out where to go next in order to best tackle attacks against multiple areas. "Gauntlet" is an endless battle mode where you defend six bases against a never-ending horde of enemy forces. "Free-For-All" is just straight up deathmatch where victory is determined either via a certain amount of kills or points & it's everybody against everybody. "BattleSphere" is the multiplayer-only mode where players are split up into two teams & the goal is to capture the opposing side's base. Finally, "Pilot Training" is exactly what it says & is a welcome addition, as while the controls aren't anything too complex there is a lot to take into consideration when it comes to speed control, targeting, weapon switching, & general flight, which does allow the player full six-degrees of freedom. There's also single-console co-op by having the second controller act as a secondary gunner, similar to what Star Wars Arcade for the 32X offered, and while Free-For-All offers up to 16 Jaguar consoles to be linked together, you can also have a gunner for each player, so BattleSphere technically supports up to 32 players! Visually the game looks solid, as while the space backdrops are understandably simple each ship has its own greatly unique design, stats, & even HUD, which is really cool.
Personally, BattleSphere isn't really my kind of game, as I do tend to get bored with most flight sims, in general; very few have managed to keep my interest for long, sadly. However, this is entirely a "me" thing, and despite the game not being in my wheelhouse I can absolutely see that 4Play took all of that time to produce an excellent title, and one that more than deserved to see release in some form on the Jag. If this is the game that supposedly made Doug Engel convince Hasbro to declare the Jaguar an open platform then it was well deserved. I would have to hope that at least one 32-player LAN game of Free-For-All was actually played somewhere, because that just sounds insane in all the best ways.
To finish things off for the "Atari" brand as a whole, Atari Interactive's next new release wouldn't happen until September 22, 2000 with the release of Breakout for the PS1 & PC, which essentially acted as a direct sequel to Pong: The Next Level, both in visual style & developer (Supersonic Software). From what I can tell, this would be the last new release from Atari Interactive, aside from branding the PC version of Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge with the Atari logo the following month, as on January 29, 2001 Hasbro would leave the video game publishing business entirely & close the sale of all of Hasbro Interactive, including the Atari brand & all of the IP it acquired from JT Storage three years prior, to French games publisher Infogrames for $100 million, though only $5 million was in cash (the rest were in common stock shares); remember, this was for way more than just Atari, hence the price paid. On October 2 that same year Infogrames announced its plans to revive the Atari brand as a publishing label, and on May 7, 2003 Infogrames would expand on that & utilize the Atari name for all of its publishing houses, with the Santa Monica, California-based Infogrames, Inc. (formerly GT Interactive) getting renamed as a new Atari, Inc., while Infogrames Interactive over in Beverly, Massachusetts was merged with what had remained of Atari Interactive as the legal owner of the Atari brand & IP catalog itself; in other words, Atari, Inc. was technically licensing its name from Atari Interactive. Similar name changes happened with Infogrames' various other international divisions & development studios, before Infogrames decided in mid-2009 to rename the main primary company itself to Atari SA, killing off the Infogrames name entirely until April 2024, when it was revived as a secondary publishing label for Atari SA.
As of today, the three primary companies using the Atari name (Atari, Inc., Atari Interactive, & Atari SA) have remained the same companies they were ever since 2003 & 2009, respectively, though the corporate structure & regimes have changed greatly over the past 20+ years. Its current form under Wade Rosen's leadership has become focused on celebrating the overall history of the Atari brand itself (with both reimaging & remastering old games & IPs becoming the primary focus), especially that of the 2600, 7800, & 8-bit PCs... though some Jaguar-themed apparel has more recently been made available for purchase, complete with "64-bit" labeling; after all, if you aren't stretching the truth then is it truly the Jaguar?
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| Good ol' AirCars just had to ruin the aesthetic, right? |
And with that... we've finally come to the end of Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog! All 50(+1) officially released cartridge games in order of release date (more or less), and I hope through this series you've come to better understand the kind of life the Atari Jaguar had, because I sure as hell had. From the test launch in late 1993 to the general launch in 1994 to the constant struggle to simply exist throughout the mid-90s to the post-Atari days starting in late 1996 to the open platform landscape that continues to keep the console alive to this day, the Jag might have seemed like some also-ran in a mightily crowded 90s gaming landscape (&, to be fair, it still was that), but the simple truth is that it was actually the last remaining remnant of an older era. Despite its proclamations of being "64-bit" & wanting to usher in a new generation of gaming, the Jaguar itself was kind of representative of the Atari of old, i.e. a stubborn (former) giant that didn't really know how to truly adjust to an ever-changing gaming world. While the 2600 had the benefit of being a massive success to help buoy Atari along, almost despite itself at points, the Jag was more akin to the 5200 (which, by the way, sold more than the Jag at ~1 million units), i.e. a console released more out of arrogance, self-assuredness, & maybe even a little panic at the competition, than anything substantial.
That being said, though... the overall official (cartridge) catalog is actually shockingly better than you'd expect! I'll do one last piece in the future so that I can properly rank them & give some final thoughts, but considering how infamous the Atari Jaguar is as an absolute failure of a console, the games that did see release between 1993 & 1998 as officially-licensed titles honestly lean more on the side of "decent to good" than outright trash, with only a small amount of titles actually being what I'd consider truly "bad" or worse; that being said, with only 50 games that can still make for a higher percentage than it should feel like. Not just that, but the homebrew & fan scene that has formed around the Jaguar has truly continued to keep the console supported following Hasbro declaring it an open platform, with around at least 100 new titles released for the Jag so far (both on cartridge & CD), including ports of titles like Total Carnage, Xenon 2: Megablast, Switchblade, Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, Gods, & The Chaos Engine, among many others; turns out porting to the Jaguar from the Atari ST is surprisingly fruitful, likely due to that Motorola 68000 chip. There have also been various unfinished or simply unreleased games that were in development back in the 90s that have since been released, like Hyper Force, Skyhammer, Arena Football '95, Another World, Robinson's Requiem, etc., & plenty of original homebrew titles have also been made for the Jaguar, showing that there are people who are willing to explore & discover the inner workings of the Jag & figure out what it could have truly delivered.
Don't go expecting me to continue covering any of these games in this fashion, though!
*All in-game screens sourced from AtariAge & Wikipedia*
AirCars © 1995 MidNite Entertainment Group, Inc. (now defunct)
Zero 5 © 1994-1996 Caspian Software (now defunct)
Iron Soldier 2 © 1997 Atari, Inc.
Worms © 1995/1996 Team17
Protector © Bethesda Softworks
BattleSphere © 1999 4Play/ScatoLOGIC
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