The Forgotten Atari Jaguar Games of CES 1995
Submitted by jgarstki on Fri, 07/13/2018 - 08:53
The year is 1995, the Atari Jaguar has failed to take off in the way that Atari would have liked and will hardly last another year on store shelves. This meant that many games that were being developed exclusively for the platform would have a tough time ever seeing the light of day. Today, the National Videogame Museum takes you back in time to the Consumer Electronics Show 1995 to take a look at a pair of forgotten, unreleased Jaguar games.
If you've heard of the game Tetrisphere for Nintendo 64, the spherical spin on tetris that released on the Nintendo 64 in the summer of 1997, you might be surprised to find out that the game was actually originally developed as the Atari Jaguar game Phear by H2O Entertainment.
The story goes that while presenting a build of the Jaguar game at CES 1995, officials from Nintendo came by and saw the game running at the booth. Reportedly, Nintendo was so impressed by what they saw, that they scooped up the game for an exclusive Nintendo 64 release. Thus, the Atari Jaguar Phear would be scrapped in favor of a future release on a console that wasn't already in its death throes.
BUT! While the Jaguar version is gone, it's not forgotten! NVM has released an exclusive video of the demo that was shown at CES 1995 on our Youtube channel!
That's not all either, we also unearthed another video from CES 1995, this time featuring Arcade Zone's unreleased beat-em-up, Conan, for the Atari Jaguar! Most widely known for the release of the Super Nintendo game "Legend", Arcade Zone only managed a couple of game releases before being shut down when they lost Sony as a publisher and could not secure a new one, leading to Conan's untimely cancellation. With huge, beautiful sprites for the time, it's an equally huge shame that this game never saw the light of day! Instead, it stands as yet another Atari tale of what could have been.