Inside Rebellion-the interview, circa '94

[Gunstar]

I have a bunch of pages of old articles, advertisements and reviews/previews torn out of old magazines and organized in a ringed binder. I came across this binder again today while looking for something else, so i thought I'd share some scans. Over the years I have posted scans on AA and other places, but many new-comers and others may have never seen them, and being buried on this site from years ago, even with a search engine can be monotonous to locate. So here is the first of some scans I am going to post again.

 

I picked the Rebellion interview first because they talk about (and have pictures of) Legions of the Undead, and action RPG that was supposed to come out for the Jaguar, and it may still be out there in some form, possibly even nearly complete. I say this because in the article it talks about it being their 3rd title in development, after AvP and Checkered Flag, but BEFORE Skyhammer (which they also talk about being in development as Hammerhead), their 4th development. And if Skyhammer was 99% complete and released by Songbird, then I figure why shouldn't LOTU still be out there in an advanced beta or final version? Since Songbird released Skyhammer, and has a relationship with Rebellion, maybe LOTU is Songbird's mystery project #2? We could only hope, as, for me, it would be the absolute best game possible out of the list of lost titles #2 might be...

 

In any case, to those newer to the community or any who may have missed this great article, here it is for your enjoyment.

Edited March 8, 2014 by Gunstar

[Willard]

Atari contacted us about our previous game, Eye of the Storm on the PC, because they were impressed with the speed of its 3D engine

 

i was interested to see what eye of the storm looked like, if anyone else wants to see

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumelJN7Gio

Edited March 8, 2014 by Willard

[Gunstar]

i was interested to see what eye of the storm looked like, if anyone else wants to see

 

 

Funny, I never looked into Eye of the Storm, but since the article stated Atari was impressed with the speed of the 3D engine, so hired them for AvP, I always assumed it was a dungeon-crawler game similar to Dungeon Master or even Wolfenstein 3D, NOT a game similar to StarGlider 1&2.

Edited March 8, 2014 by Gunstar

[Gunstar]

If that's at full speed of the PC game on that Youtube video, the Amiga and Atari ST could run circles around it if they had gotten versions of it. They already did with games like Star Glider 2 and similar ilk. It must have been impressive for a PC though, at that time I guess (probably 286/386).

[VladR]

It must have been impressive for a PC though, at that time I guess (probably 286/386).

I can assure you that it would not be impressive on PC at that time at all and most certainly not on 386, which already ran TFX, which is at least one generation ahead of the game you posted.

 

 

Eye of the Storm could be , perhaps, impressive on PC XT 8 MHz, certainly not on PC AT, and definitely not on some 16 MHz 286...

[Gunstar]

Fair enough, but TFX is on the Amiga too, a computer several years older than the 16 MHz 286 or 386 machine, and it looks just as good and fast & smooth on an 8 MHz Amiga. Atari's 16-bit, 8MHz ST/STE also had similar titles like F29 Retaliator which looks nearly as good, and runs twice as fast and smooth as TFX when run on a 16 MHZ Atari Mega STE.

 

Amiga:

 

So it's not so advanced on your PC's. It also looks about as good as the 3DO's Flying Nightmares.

 

In any case, my point was that this Eye of the Storm would have been impressive in mid to late 80's, but doesn't impress me, even looking at it with eyes from the early 90's.

 

But I digress, I intended this thread be about the Jaguar, and LOTU discussion (besides just for the article for people to see), NOT old flight sims from PC's. So enough of this for me. Thanks for your input!

Edited March 9, 2014 by Gunstar

[Willard]

In any case, my point was that this Eye of the Storm would have been impressive in mid to late 80's, but doesn't impress me, even looking at it with eyes from the early 90's

 

Eye of the Storm was release in '93 on the Amiga and PC. I haven't seen the minimum specs required to run it so I can't really say whether it was impressive when considering the machines it could run on.

 

Still, that was the game Atari judged Rebellion by before giving them responsibility for one of the Jaguar's most important games. I thought Atari's handling of AVP was a little more calculated but it seems to be another case of Atari being cheap and irresponsible again, and rebellion fortuitiously pulling off a magic trick. I guess when you handle stuff like Atari you get monumental disasters like Tiny Toons (I think it was important that TTA work out for Atari) but things also work out once in awhile as per AVP.

[Gunstar]

 

Eye of the Storm was release in '93 on the Amiga and PC. I haven't seen the minimum specs required to run it so I can't really say whether it was impressive when considering the machines it could run on.

 

Still, that was the game Atari judged Rebellion by before giving them responsibility for one of the Jaguar's most important games. I thought Atari's handling of AVP was a little more calculated but it seems to be another case of Atari being cheap and irresponsible again, and rebellion fortuitiously pulling off a magic trick. I guess when you handle stuff like Atari you get monumental disasters like Tiny Toons (I think it was important that TTA work out for Atari) but things also work out once in awhile as per AVP.

regardless of the specs required, Star Glider 2 for one example among many, was released in the latter half of the 80's, I think '86 or '87 for the Amiga and ST and it is far better than The Eye of the Storm. For '93 that is crap. Maybe Rebellion was just better at bit-mapped graphics than polygons, as a comparison between AvP and Checkered flag seems to indicate. Although, Skyhammer is a very impressive polygon game for the Jag, by them...so, who knows.

[+Stephen]

SNIP

In any case, my point was that this Eye of the Storm would have been impressive in mid to late 80's, but doesn't impress me, even looking at it with eyes from the early 90's.

SNIP

I thought exactly the same thing - I see no way in any shape or form that could be considered impressive in the early 90s. Hell - you could almost get something looking like that posted video running on the 8-bit Atari from 1979.

[swapd0]

That TFX is on amiga 1200

[sh3-rg]

That TFX is on amiga 1200

Actually, it's worse than that, from video info it says this is an emulated and faster than standard AGA Amiga:

 

"This game requires a pretty high spec amiga to get the best from the game, but theres plenty of gfx options to try and scale to the hardware. AGA Amiga required, fast processor prefured and some extra memory. The Game is only around 95% complete as the game was shelved before completion so any bugs are due to this and the gfx errors that appear in the video are todo with WinUAE JIT emulation (no gfx errors on my Amiga - but game is much slower). Also as thegame was never finished , the game can have compatability issues with higher spec amigas. 040 exe doesnt work, so only plain 68000 or fpu version is usable and i dont think 060 is suported at all, so game can still be slow."

[+CyranoJ]

Gotta disagree quite strongly with this one, as I bought TFX to play on my (at the time i486 DX2/66) PC - and it blew anything the ST/Amiga could do out of the water. The closest on the ST would be Falcon, and that looks and feels very dated against this game.

 

 

Fair enough, but TFX is on the Amiga too, a computer several years older than the 16 MHz 286 or 386 machine, and it looks just as good and fast & smooth on an 8 MHz Amiga. Atari's 16-bit, 8MHz ST/STE also had similar titles like F29 Retaliator which looks nearly as good, and runs twice as fast and smooth as TFX when run on a 16 MHZ Atari Mega STE.

[Gunstar]

Gotta disagree quite strongly with this one, as I bought TFX to play on my (at the time i486 DX2/66) PC - and it blew anything the ST/Amiga could do out of the water. The closest on the ST would be Falcon, and that looks and feels very dated against this game.

 

 

I missed spoke there, I said F29 runs twice as fast/smooth as TFX on a 16Mhz Mega STE; I meant, F29 runs twice as smooth on the 16Mhz atari as opposed to 8MHz Atari and Amiga. I also assumed that the youtube video of TFX I posted for Amiga, was an 8Mhz Amiga, but someone mentioned it was an Amiga 1200, I have no idea what it's specs are. So I was attempting to compare F29 on a mega STe at 16MHz to the speed of TFX in that PC video, setting aside TFX's better graphics, though to me, they don't look that much better.

Edited March 10, 2014 by Gunstar