Core Design and Jaguar info from Lost Dragon

[high voltage]

It's a long struggle trying to get info on Core Designs 32X/Jaguar era
'Lost Games', latest person whom i contacted who got back to me was
Gavin Rummery, a lead coder on Tomb Raider, so i asked him IF it was
true the game had started out on Jaguar CD, his reply:

' and i don't recall anything about any Jaguar
> development that may have been going on in other parts of the company.
>
> People were always tinkering with things, but it was usually one guy who
> had been tasked with seeing if it was worth porting any games onto a new
> platform. With the Jaguar it was more or less DOA, so I presume it was
> given up on.'

Search continues, but so far, other than that EDGE paid-for by Atari
supplement, there's nothing to suggest work ever really started in
bringing Tomb Raider (as we know it) to the Jaguar, let alone Jag
CD.If, Core thought the platform was DOA, very unlikely they'd have
wasted valuable time/resources on a Jag CD project.

Despite emailing him, i've still not heard back from Jeremy Smith....

[ovalbugmann]

Interesting ☺ Jaguar more or less DOA sounds about right, Atari fans hoped it would do well, but the glory days were over, Jaguar marketing dept. /software/ release timing should have been better.

[Rex Dart]

Wow, Dead or Alive on the Jaguar?

[high voltage]

Questions have gone to a KEY Ex-Core Design person who might just yet
be able to answer the myth of Tomb Raider on Jag CD, along with claims
that:BC Racers, Shellshock, Swagman etc were also headed to Jaguar at
one point.

Also, from old interview with Core Design, Edge Jan'96


Paul Douglas (coder on Tomb Raider) 'We spent 2 years on Tomb Raider
and i think i spent all that time tweaking the control system trying
to make it better and better..' also: ' I'd say about 40% of the
programming time on Tomb Raider was spent developing tools, which was
well worth itbecause then the artists can go off and put all their
expression into what they are doing without bothering us all the
time'.


Core also talked about 'never envisioned having Lara swimming, but we
made the decision to put that in, which pushed the development time by
a few months, but it aaded a whole lot more to the game'

So even IF work started on an earlier version of Tomb Raider, it was
only the PS1/Saturn/PC versions which had the swimming elements in....



Also the Tomb Raider team said the following:


'we had this vision of a character in a cinematic enviroment.That was
the original concept of Tomb Raider.We had immense problems initally
designing a system around the character that would let them move
within a camera system'.


'We already had sketches and ideas about the game for about a year
before we even finished BC Racers'.


'Generally we find that new engines are derived for individual games'

Now, my personal line of thinking, based on what was said in the edge
interview is that like Probe, with Alien Trilogy, the concept was
designed for a Mega CD game (as Alien trilogy was originally planned)
but once the teams tried to implement concepts into actual game code,
they found the hardware simply was'nt powerful enough to do the ideas
justice and so the projects were shelved until, newer, more powerful
systems came along, in Alien Trilogy's case the 32X, inital attempts
made again, hardware still found 'wanting' and only the likes of the
Saturn and PS1 (console wise) had the hardware needed to bring
concepts to workable reality.


Tomb Raider team described Tomb Raider as 'a big, big project' so IF
Jaguar was seen as DOA as Gavin has described, it hardly makes
commercial sense for Core to pour serious resources into a flagship
project like Tomb Raider, on a system they knew was, from a retail
point of view, DOA and also develop said game for an add-on for said
DOA console, does it?.


Looking at other projects detailed in the interview, BOTH Fighting
Force and Ninja started out as Saturn specific titles, purely because
that when both were started, leader coders were more knowledegable on
the Sega Saturn......their coders were so heavily involved with the
Mega CD and the saturn in it's early days.


Given whats said in the interview, the brief email from Gavin summing
up Cores feelings on the Jaguar and how just 1 person would be
tinkering with other formats, the size of the team involved on Tomb
Raider etc etc.I personally cannot see Core devoting the time to Tomb
Raider on Jaguar, in terms of game originally being planned for it.


Hopefully my latest contact will be able to spill the proverbial
beans, but so far my gut instinct says they'd of been far more likely
to try and develop a flapship new franchise for Sega (and then Sony's)
flagship hardware (just as they used MCD Thunderhawk to showcase the
MCD hardware) than risk it going on the Jaguar CD Drive
instead.Concept art etc might well have been tested, just as Creature
shock FMV was converted and tested, but lets wait and see what comes
back in.

Been an interesting journey looking into Lost jaguar games.Creature
Shock put to bed, got a very honest opinion from Ex-I.D coder (Dave
Taylor) on how I.D's games fared (commercially) on Jaguar and thus him
not recalling Quake even being a 'Brain fart' on the Jag, lets see
what Core continue to come up with.


If nothing else, least we get further insights as to how
developers/publishers viewed the system from a retail point of view.


I've interviews out with a few other Jaguar coders as well.watch this space :-)

[high voltage]

Re:Core's comments about:


'we had this vision of a character in a cinematic enviroment.That was
the original concept of Tomb Raider.We had immense problems initally
designing a system around the character that would let them move
within a camera system'.


It should also be noted that Factor 5 (Rogue Squadron games etc)
originally planned to do a 3D Indiania Jones game on the SNES, using
the FX chip, but found it was'nt powerful enough, so they switched to
PC.

So we know of at least 2 BIG developers who'd tried to do 3D adventure
games on the 16 Bit consoles using newer technology for them (MD MCD
and SNES SFX chip) and found them lacking, so it stands to reason
attempts might of been made sooner as newer, more powerful hardware
game out to 'try again' and see IF harware was there yet

[high voltage]

Nov 22 at 9:41 PM

The latest person from Core Design i've managed to track down would
have been responsible for the very supplement Atari paid-for that was
given away free, with EDGE magazine (and had supposed Jaguar Tomb
Raider and Swagman etc screens, the supplement no-one seems to have or
even scans of...).


Of course as has been proven so many times now, finding and contacting
does by no means equal a good chance of a reply (emailed Jeremy Smith
after being personally vouched for, by a buisness partner of his-never
heard anything back) and i've had to approach latest finding via
company website, so fingers crossed message gets to him...but even if
it does, nothing to say he'll even want to talk about events so long
ago.

Fingers crossed, but if nothing else i can at least suggest who's best
to ask, who would of handled the promotional material, in this
instance.

[Orion_]

Reading at this ex-Sony PS1 developer interview:http://www.fultonsoft.com/2009/07/01/an-interview-with-the-playstation-museum/

Case in point: Tomb Raider for the PS. The *ORIGINAL* game, that is, was running at about 5 fps when the developers brought it in for analysis. It was essentially unplayable, and the developers were beginning to get worried that it wasn’t going to get any better. Keep in mind that this is still just a few months after the machine first launched. Many developers were still working on their first title and didn’t really know what sort of performance they could expect from the machine. After doing our analysis, a few simple optimizations brought the frame rate up to 20 fps.

 

So, if "Core Design" developers, were struggling to get something running good on the PS1, (which has a dedicated polygon renderer chip and math chip)

I guess they would have had pretty bad performance on the Atari Jaguar which had to do all by itself using highly optimized asm code for the GPU.

Edited November 23, 2014 by Orion_

[Zerosquare]

As a matter of fact, the same person also did technical support for the Jaguar before working for Sony, and compares both machines in the interview:

David: How do you think developer support from SCEA differed from Sega, Nintendo, or Atari? What are some possible reasons that developers preferred to program for the PlayStation rather than the Saturn or N64?

 

Mike Fulton: Developer support at Atari was me, actually. I was the developer support manager for the Jaguar and the Atari ST computers before that. For the Jaguar, my main purview was the tools and sample code. We also had Normen Kowalewski and Scott Sanders providing support.

 

I can’t say I really had any direct experience of Sega or Nintendo’s programs, so I can’t answer to that. But as to Atari vs. Sony, I have to say that the differences in support were greatly colored by the fact that from 1993-1995, console development underwent a major paradigm shift. It started with the Atari Jaguar, and ended with the PlayStation.

 

The Jaguar was the first console where 3D graphics were more than an occasional novelty. Prior to the Jaguar, console games were almost all sprites and tiles and had been for a decade or more. Development cycles for the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis averaged 6 months. But once 3D graphics entered the picture, everything changed. For one thing, the industry had to create a whole new generation of tools for generating 3D artwork and animation, and developers and artists had to learn to use those tools. That all had a big impact on the length of a project.

 

Also, while the Jaguar had the first real hint of 3D acceleration, the two 64-bit processors weren’t really C-language friendly, so it took a master-class assembly programmer to get good performance out of the system. So a lot of projects included a lot of time for code optimization.

 

As for 3D processing, the Jaguar GPU was great at doing 3D vector math, but you had to basically hand-feed the blitter individual scan line segments of each polygon at a time to do rendering. Projects involving 3D graphics had to devote at least a couple of months to the development of a good 3D rendering pipeline, to say nothing of the 3D game engine required to feed that pipeline polygons to draw.

 

Then came the PlayStation. The PlayStation was the first console where developers were expected to use supplied libraries rather than programming for the bare metal. Jaguar programming was definitely bare-metal, but PlayStation programming was anything but.

 

There’s been a lot of debate about the motivation for Sony making developers to use libraries, but to me the reason is clear. Without the Sony-supplied libraries for accessing the hardware, game projects would have taken 6 months longer or more. The PlayStation is the machine that completed the 3D acceleration equation. Like the Jaguar, it had a co-processor that handled 3D vector math quite efficiently. However, unlike the Jaguar, the PlayStation had a DMA-driven graphics primitive renderer (the GPU). Set up a display list of primitives and set the GPU off and running, and the CPU could do other things while the graphics were being rendered asynchronously.

 

Because of the asynchronous nature of the way the PlayStation’s hardware worked, once you pointed the hardware at a primitive list, it processed it as fast as possible. This made it possible to get good performance without going through quite so many hoops as with previous console hardware. Combined with the relatively fast (for the time) CPU, it made it generally unnecessary for most projects to worry so much about extreme code optimization. Console development had largely been assembly-language based up to that point, but with the PlayStation it was possible to do entire projects in C or C++ without writing any assembly language code at all.

 

Thus, the paradigm shift that the Jaguar started, games with 3D graphics and the corresponding tools for artwork & animation, the PlayStation finished with the use of asynchronous processing, the use of code libraries, and the shift to higher-level languages for development.

Edited November 23, 2014 by Zerosquare

[Lost Dragon]

:-) Getting this in whilst the bloody browser lets me sign in here:

Ok, i've been busy updating Unseen64 with a lot of stuff (mostly Dreamcast related, but also misc Jaguar, Ps1, Saturn and PC stuff, tracked down coder of DC Jump Runner etc), plus passed on lot of info on Lost Aliens/AVP games to AVP Galaxy, so really on a 'Lost games Info quest at moment' hence trying to get the lowdown from Core Design on lost 32X/Jaguar era games.

I firmly believe in being 100% honest with folks, so..regarding trying to get the low down from Core:Susie Hamilton (Core Designs then PR lady) talked to C+VG in it's then Next Gen pull out mag, about planned 32X, Saturn and Ps1 games, but fact Jaguar was never mentioned, to myself speaks volumes and backs up Gavins comment about Jaguar being D.O.A to Core.What happen to Susie after Circle Studios went under i simply do not know.

Jeremy Smith i did email, had key person vouch for me, never had a reply back, but i was warned Jeremy was approaching key deadline at work.

[Lost Dragon]

I also emailed a key coder of BC Racers to see if there were any plans for a Jaguar conversion, again no reply.I have however been in contact with another key Core Design coder and put questions to him, just eagerly awaiting a reply.

 

Also sent email to person who'd have supplied Edge/Atari with screens/info for early Tomb Raider/Swagman screens for Edges Jaguar supplement, but nothing heard.My 'guess' is, said screens were from cross-platform development kits, not actual Jaguar dev.kits..i could be wrong, but.....

 

The Tomb Raider team told Edge that the Saturn had a much harder time of T.R than the PS1 as there was no use of the hardware as such, it was just pushing an awful lot of polygons around...so how any attempt to do an earlier version on Jaguar might have fared, if any work had been started, i dread to think, however from said interview, it's clar a Jaguar CD version, would have lacked the swimming sections completely, as they were only added to PS1/Saturn/PC version in final few months.

[Lost Dragon]

New day, new updates.Some good:Contact has been made with person who'd have been involved in the Jaguar Promotional material given to Edge/Atari for the Jaguar supplement they gave away (though person does warn me it was a long time ago to try and recal too much detail).

 

The not so good:Graphics artist i was hoping to ask about work on various Atari platforms has been taken ill, so that's on the back burner.

[108 Stars]

I also think the quest for info on a Jag TR will bring nothing to light. It is a nice myth for Jag fans, but Core was a very successful Company at the time, and it was plain obvious the Jaguar was DOA. Loyal fans still bought it, same with the CD³², but I doubt many People in the industry, be it devs, Publishers or magazines really gave it a second thought as a viable contender.

 

The very best you could hope for is for such companies to try and make a quick buck by porting their older and less advanced games. Like Soulstar or B.C.Racers in Core's case. Never would they have poured time and work into a high Profile next gen product like TR if the target platform wasn't a good bet for success.

 

That's probably also a reason why so many ports came to the Jag. Nice games as Flashback, Syndicate or the likes are, they were old or technically rather undemanding and could be produced along with other Versions or as quick ports.

[Lost Dragon]

All i'm hoping from with either or both of my contacts from Core Design is a degree of closure on the myth of Tomb Raider Jaguar CD.If info can be had on just where those screens in Edge's Jaguar supplement Atari paid for or Gamefan actually came from, superb.It's my personal belief they are simply concept shots, perhaps from high-end PC's geared up for development for upcoming hardware.Tomb Raider team told Edge that 'so much of the code is generic C.Only about 4% of it is platform specific', so to me it's clear once worked started on TR, proper, it was a known big project and thus designed to be brought to as many leading formats as possible.To make such a resource hungry game specific to an add-on device like the Jaguar CD (or even say the 32X or MCD if earlier attempts made on MCD) seems to me to be commercial madness, espically after you'n seen such little returns from MCD games like Thunderhawk and this on a platform with a huge installed user base (MD was huge here and USA).

[Lost Dragon]

(Cont)....

How on earth they would of thought the Jaguar CD was the right platform to back, is beyond my degree of reasoning.

We've heard from ex-Core coders, Microprose, Virgin, Thallion, Argonaught, Psygnosis, ATD, Imagitec, Konami etc etc how the industry viewed the Jaguar and Atari's abilty to handle the support and marketing of it, based on their limited cash reserves and past failures, plus Atari's insistance it had to compete with PS1/saturn.

Madness.Atari lacked the money to secure big name games and the hardware, good as it was, was'nt in same league as the newer consoles, no matter what a vocal minority still claim to this day.

I firmly believe it's far better we never saw Jaguar versions of Quake/TR/Daytona USA/NFS etc, let alone Creature shock, water World etc.They'd have done nothing to salvage Jaguars reputation.

[108 Stars]

Were the Returns for Thunderhawk so Little? I believed pretty much everybody who had a MCD had Thunderhawk. Even in Germany, where the MCD was panned and a flop, TH Kind of was for it what Tempest 2000 is for the Jaguar.

 

And yes, I agree. Doing such things for the Jag would have been suicide, even looking at it from 1993. The freakin' 3DO was seen as a system with much more potential. That's why I like the term DOA for the Jag. I remember an article from the first half of 1993 by Julian Eggebrecht of Factor 5. It was an article in a Sega Magazine basically warning the fans to buy a Mega CD; and explaining what the future holds. Yet even in the first half of 1993 he described the Jaguar as "Atari's last battle" and a distant Underdog.

 

If it was quite apparent to the outside world how bad the Situation with Atari was, imagine how clear it must have been insidet he industry.

Edited November 24, 2014 by 108 Stars

[Lost Dragon]

:-) What i mean by Thunderhawk having so little in way of returns for Core Design on MCD, was that despite being a best seller on the system in the UK, the MCD itself sold so poorly, given just how huge the installed user base of the MD was here.Seen some low figures quoted (things like only sold to 4% of ALL UK MD owners) for actual MCD sales to existing MD owners, but no Sspecific fales from Sega themselves, but i do know i was the only daft bugger to buy a MCD (and on day 1) in my area, shop i bought it from said they honestly thought it would of been massive given how well MD was doing, but high price and lack of killer games put people off from the start.

 

So in comparison to Cores MD cart games, they were attempting to sell Thunderhawk to a very limited user base in comparison.

 

So would they really want to put even bigger risks on developing Tomb Raider for a CD add-on for an Atari console, given how Core would of been very aware of just how the ST, Lynx and Falcon had fared in UK alone under Atari?.

[Lost Dragon]

If you were in charge of greenlighting what was, in reality, the biggest new I.P you'd launched for a number of years, something your teams had been sat on, waiting for console technology to reach point where concept was feasable and you knew it'd simply devour resources (as cinematic games tend to do), you'd be planning it for all the major, leading formats.

 

 

Hardware from a company you knew had the resources to market the device properly (something Atari lacked, the cash to offer up a timed exclusaive type deal, if it became clear just how huge game was going to be) and you'd design code so it was 'straight forward enough' to convert to other platforms.

 

 

Now, i'm not sure about anyone else, but Jaguar CD is not what i'd stake the resources of my company on, having seen Atari's track record with previous consoles in UK (after the 2600):

 

The XE Games System, 7800, Lynx (poorly supported, limited marketing), Panther:annouced, canned, Jaguar details annouced, UK press already questioning it's chances.....

[high voltage]

...

Edited November 24, 2014 by high voltage

[JagChris]

 

 

Madness.Atari lacked the money to secure big name games and the hardware, good as it was, was'nt in same league as the newer consoles, no matter what a vocal minority still claim to this day.

 

 

The Jaguar design was finished around 91. Its nearly 3 years older than any of its 32/64 bit contemporaries.

[Lost Dragon]

Indeed.Im not knocking just what the Jaguar hardware offered to developers of it's era, it was a very flexible piece of hardware, but you 'listen' to ATD, Imagitec etc talking about how Atari, having been 'spooked' by initally 3DO and then PS1 and Saturn and suddenly wanted Jaguar games to feature lots of texture-mapping etc to compete and i personally struggle to believe claims that by using work arounds for the hardware bugs, or better toolsets or certain game engines, Jaguar is suddenly going to pull of 'competent' versions of Daytona USA, Quake etc.

 

 

There was certainly a lot more that could of been done with the hardware and Atari would of been wiser to get developers to play to the hardware's strengths (like Minter suggested, you could of done a lovely, update to Virus, all Gouraud shaded polygon landscapes etc) and we could have seen some fantastic 2D games, but instead we saw Atari attempting to clone popular games of the day, cue Virtua Racing/Fighter attempts that did severe damage to the image.

[SoulBlazer]

Don't forget the fact also that even 'lower' 16 bit gaming systems like the Genesis and SNES were still supported all the way up to 1998 with new games......Sega with add on's like the 32X and the CD drive and Nintendo by pushing the system with extra chips on the carts. Stuff like Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG really pushed the SNES on to a longer life and showed the system could compete with some of these 'advanced' cart and CD based systems. Not to mention they were cheaper to buy and were backed by companies with good track records and people behind them.

[Lost Dragon]

@SoulBlazer:Yep, the impression i'm getting from 'The Industry' regarding the Jaguar, from the people i'm contacting who worked at places like Core, Argonaught, Domark etc is that for all the 'wooing' Atari might have done to try and get them to support the Jaguar, publishers/software houses were simply not going to risk pouring resources into developing for the Jaguar.

 

Instead it was far safer/wiser to continue pumping out MD/SNES/MCD games, whilst getting geared up for Saturn and Playstation development, as Sony/Sega had the resources to compete.Atari simply did'nt.

 

Overall pattern or message i'm getting from my contacts is simply that the Jaguar really was DOA.Latest quotes i posted last night just helping cement this.

[Warzard]

There was certainly a lot more that could of been done with the hardware and Atari would of been wiser to get developers to play to the hardware's strengths (like Minter suggested, you could of done a lovely, update to Virus, all Gouraud shaded polygon landscapes etc) and we could have seen some fantastic 2D games

 

It is interesting with the amount of 2D/2.5D in the arcades and on computers at that time(some that never saw a home release) that could have really looked good on the Jag, Atari choose to play to the systems weakness and not its strength.

[Lost Dragon]

@Warzard:If you read UK press from the era, it soon became clear Atari simply took a knee-jerk reaction to the arrival of the PS1 and Saturn.You had poor old Darryl Still's letter in C+VG claiming Jaguar was on par with Saturn etc (ripped to shreds following month), plus ATD talking to Edge saying how Atari, having seen Shockwave on 3DO, suddenly wanted Jaguar CD games to feature lots of texture-mapping etc and Imagitec Design, telling Gamesmaster Magazine Freelancer had been canned on Jag CD after Atari went into 'complete and utter mental mode' wanting lots of polygons, texture-mapping, light sourcing etc.

 

When before Atari had poised the Jaguar as being the system to rip the guts out of it's 16 Bit rivals, the MD/SNES.

[Lost Dragon]

UPDATE time:1 of the 2 (new) Ex-Core Design sources i put question of Jaguar Tomb Raider (and other 'claimed' Lost Jaguar games) has gotten back to me, said he was sorry for delay, but was going to have to give the questions raised some serious thought before replying....

 

 

So, bit more promising than:Sorry, but it's been so long, i simply cannot recal.

 

 

Fingers crossed some new info soon comes to light.