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Primal Rage 2 on the VCS?


Primal Rage 2 on the VCS?   

11 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you like to see Primal Rage 2 released on the VCS for the first time?

    • Yes
      9
    • No
      2

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  • Poll closed on 06/10/2021 at 03:59 AM

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1 hour ago, SabertoothRetro said:

I'd love to see it on the VCS but Primal Rage was an Atari Games arcade property. Unless Atari Inc. worked out a licensing deal with Warner Interactive Entertainment (the current license holder of Atari Games' properties, including Primal Rage) it is unlikely. Dare to dream though! 

 

That's a shame but it'll be nice to see it come out someday. 

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Wasn't Primal Rage 2 the Arcade game that never was finished, and only a prototype rom is floating around?  I've learned that younger people aren't as excited about stop motion animation, so there is that.  Poor Ray Harryhausen was recently slammed by someone I know, and it made me sad!

 

I still think Tramiel's choice to only buy the consumer side and ignore the arcade division, for what was reportedly dirt cheap, was a huge mistake and completely changed the industry.  Granted Nintendo basically cheating with the developers and forcing exclusives didn't help...

 

I was thinking about this the other day though; as annoying as some of the things Atari SA has done; the VCS is actually the first console designed by a company named Atari since the 5200 (as the 7800 was designed by GCC and the Jaguar was designed by Flare).

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20 minutes ago, leech said:

Wasn't Primal Rage 2 the Arcade game that never was finished, and only a prototype rom is floating around?

Correct.  It is technically a proto still but boards exist and at least one cab.  If Atari wants it they will have to talk to Warner.

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All you need for it to work is:

 

License the Primal Rage IP from Warner

 

Buy the IP from Warner. 

 

Or

 

Pay WB Games/one of their subsidiary studios like Avalanche to make the game for you.

 

TWD The Walking Dead GIF - TWD TheWalkingDead WalkingDead GIFs

 

While licensing could be a cheaper route, it's still going to cost a lot of money. Warner is pretty clueless as to what IP they own from Atari Games/Midway (aside from Mortal Kombat and Gauntlet).  I've had discussions with several different people who have looked into working with Warner licensing and Warner just assumes that every game from that pool is worth about a million or so. That's why when Eugene Jarvis' company Raw Thrills resurrected Hydro Thunder, they didn't bother to license that name and just called it H2Overdrive, as what Warner wanted for the HT name it wouldn't have made it worth the trouble. 

 

Regardless the money option picked though, that's just the beginning. Let's say that Atari sees your posts, think it's a great thing to spend their money on, and spends the million or more on licensing/buying it. Now what? You could release a very incomplete, but at least playable game to the tiny VCS audience, but it would still require someone to get the game running in emulation and that isn't going to be free. A sane investor would want to finish the game, but the original source code & assets have not been discovered (likely lost long ago), so that means you have to start from scratch. Even if you did have those assets though, converting code & assets from an obscure mid-90s arcade platform to work on modern hardware would be an extra expensive PITA.

 

The wisest course for anyone who wants to work on the PR IP would be to reboot it, starting from the beginning. You could incorporate the PR2 ideas in it, but either way, you still are starting over, then needing to design a 1v1 fighting game where fans of such games are very picky about how these titles play. PR was never that popular (I have one in my arcade right now and it's always the lowest earning fighter I have, making less than $5 a week), and when you look at fighting games that people really want to compete on, PR isn't it. Atari Games made more off of the merchandising on it than they did on game sales. 

 

Overall, what you're proposing would easily cost in the millions; Moreso on the logical route of rebooting the game, although if you really wanted to see the PR2 game as Galloping Ghost has it released without changes, that would be the cheapest way to go, but it wouldn't be a very sound business decision to spend that kind of money in the hopes of getting a few, maybe several thousand sales.

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1 hour ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

All you need for it to work is:

 

License the Primal Rage IP from Warner

 

Buy the IP from Warner. 

 

Or

 

Pay WB Games/one of their subsidiary studios like Avalanche to make the game for you.

 

TWD The Walking Dead GIF - TWD TheWalkingDead WalkingDead GIFs

 

While licensing could be a cheaper route, it's still going to cost a lot of money. Warner is pretty clueless as to what IP they own from Atari Games/Midway (aside from Mortal Kombat and Gauntlet).  I've had discussions with several different people who have looked into working with Warner licensing and Warner just assumes that every game from that pool is worth about a million or so. That's why when Eugene Jarvis' company Raw Thrills resurrected Hydro Thunder, they didn't bother to license that name and just called it H2Overdrive, as what Warner wanted for the HT name it wouldn't have made it worth the trouble. 

 

Regardless the money option picked though, that's just the beginning. Let's say that Atari sees your posts, think it's a great thing to spend their money on, and spends the million or more on licensing/buying it. Now what? You could release a very incomplete, but at least playable game to the tiny VCS audience, but it would still require someone to get the game running in emulation and that isn't going to be free. A sane investor would want to finish the game, but the original source code & assets have not been discovered (likely lost long ago), so that means you have to start from scratch. Even if you did have those assets though, converting code & assets from an obscure mid-90s arcade platform to work on modern hardware would be an extra expensive PITA.

 

The wisest course for anyone who wants to work on the PR IP would be to reboot it, starting from the beginning. You could incorporate the PR2 ideas in it, but either way, you still are starting over, then needing to design a 1v1 fighting game where fans of such games are very picky about how these titles play. PR was never that popular (I have one in my arcade right now and it's always the lowest earning fighter I have, making less than $5 a week), and when you look at fighting games that people really want to compete on, PR isn't it. Atari Games made more off of the merchandising on it than they did on game sales. 

 

Overall, what you're proposing would easily cost in the millions; Moreso on the logical route of rebooting the game, although if you really wanted to see the PR2 game as Galloping Ghost has it released without changes, that would be the cheapest way to go, but it wouldn't be a very sound business decision to spend that kind of money in the hopes of getting a few, maybe several thousand sales.

I mean on the bright side, Mame does actually emulate the prototype board... I think it was even semi-playable last I checked.  But yeah at that point though, they may as well... I don't know... Come up with a NEW IP?  wait.. that might be crazy talk... Or just make 'Atari Fighter!'d punch the shit out of people with Bentley Bear!

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I don't have a high opinion of anyone at Atari right now, but even then I doubt they are as stupid as to think that spending millions to get a game that's both incomplete and only semi-playable in MAME makes any sense at all - but even then, you can't just slap a ROM into MAME in a commercial project and call it a day. Pretty sure that's illegal, so they'd have to hire someone to come up with their own stable emulator, and on a single game, so you wouldn't be making something that would work for other projects. There's no other way to slice it - unless you're Bill Gates going on a spending binge to distract yourself from your divorce woes, developing PR2 into a releasable game makes zero sense. That also pretty much applies to anything else that Warner owns from AG. There's no cheap way to resurrect any of those classics as a modern game. 

 

A new IP would make the most sense for Atari in finding something for the VCS, but it's still not cheap to develop and it's a higher risk than a license since you don't have a built-in audience off the bat.

 

Granted, Atari doesn't actually have anyone on staff that can engineer a game, so they have to go bidding or they're approached with something they like that they can afford. In terms of fighters, if creating a coherent, playable fighting game was easy then everyone would do it, but it's a genre where the line between something like Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat and complete garbage is razor thin.

 

 

 

 

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MAME is (according to wikipedia) under GPLv2 and some sub things are BSD, so would be perfectly legal to sell in a commercial product as long as any changes to the code are posted where a customer can download it.  Or if it is BSD, then they don't even need that. 

 

But for sure trying to even further develop something like an Arcade prototype AND get the rights to sell it... for a game that was literally canceled because they didn't think it would sell that well back when it was in production, let alone now days.

 

Actually when I think about it, did Atari ever do a fighter that was really successful?   For that matter, I can only name a handful that people liked, the 2 huge ones are Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat... then the smaller ones are like Tekken... okay, I can't think of others.  Pit fighter was cool, but seemed to be before the genre really kicked off.  Dead or Alive is only popular due to bouncy things, and the modern version of any fighter game has succumbed to the "if you want the entire game, pay us 1k in DLC..." problem...  MK hasn't gotten quite that bad, but it is still pricey if you want all characters to be playable.

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14 hours ago, leech said:

Actually when I think about it, did Atari ever do a fighter that was really successful?   For that matter, I can only name a handful that people liked, the 2 huge ones are Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat... then the smaller ones are like Tekken... okay, I can't think of others.  Pit fighter was cool, but seemed to be before the genre really kicked off.  Dead or Alive is only popular due to bouncy things, and the modern version of any fighter game has succumbed to the "if you want the entire game, pay us 1k in DLC..." problem...  MK hasn't gotten quite that bad, but it is still pricey if you want all characters to be playable.

Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are the two biggest names, however there are very large & still active fanbases for a number of fighters out there - Tekken (which helped drive a lot of sales for PlayStation), Killer Instinct, Virtua Fighter, The King of Fighters, Marvel Vs. Capcom, SoulCalibur. Any one of these games gets a release right now, and they can sell pretty well. Speaking of that, you have a new Virtua Fighter launching this next week and a new KOF coming soon that's seeing a bit of hype. Look up the EVO tournament and you'll see just how serious a lot of gamers take the genre.

 

Nothing ever came out of Atari (either Corp. or Games) that could compare. For Atari Corp., they did get some fighters published, but all designed by others and excepting the Primal Rage port on the JCD, you just had poor man clones - Ultra Vortek = Mortal Kombat, Fight For Life = Virtua Fighter. They didn't publish Double Dragon V, but that's a slum man's SF2. 

 

Atari Games found that light-gun games and racers brought them much better/easier success than fighters & beat 'em ups did. PitFighter wasn't a fighter in the sense that Street Fighter is - it's more of an arena beat 'em up, and mainly got attention at the time from the violence and digitized sprites (it was 1990, so both things were pretty novel). They did have Batman, as well as a beat 'em up game that did all right, but is fairly obscure called Guardians of the Hood. Otherwise, the only other fighter they did release apart from Primal Rage was MACE: The Dark Age

 

Imagine for a second you are tasked with developing the Next Big Thing in the fighting genre. That's a very daunting task, as there were reasons beyond novelty & graphics or violence that drove crowds of people to play SF or MK in arcades.  They were good games and had a lot of nuances put into them that drove replay, and when those nuances were missing, players noticed that and decided to spend their coins on the better games instead of the pale imitations.

 

Atari Games did develop a few other fighters, but none were ever good enough to warrant a release, just like PR2:

 

Cyber Storm - Tried to be SF2 with robots

Vicious Circle - Another Killer Instinct clone

Blood Lust I.K.3 - This was actually International Karate 3, but was also trying to be Killer Instinct

Tenth Degree/Juko Threat - This one probably had the most potential out of all of AG's unreleased fighters, but it also didn't do anything new at the time and flopped on test.

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I really liked Mace and Vicious Circle.  Yeah, I was thinking about Virtua Fighter and King of Fighters is definitely popular as well.  But 100% none were as huge as MK and SF. 

Personally I always preferred playing IK and IK+ on the Atari computers, those were a blast.

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