Supercross 3D

[Bill Loguidice]

7 minutes ago, Editorb said:

Pardon my ignorance (although my ignorance abides and flourishes, pardoned or no), but I've frequently seen laments that Atari did not leverage its valuable old-timey IP. The Tramiels did not want the arcade division, which Warner spun off as Atari Games. Surely AG retained all arcade IP. Yet Atari produced T2K based on arcade Tempest, and Defender 2000, which was baed on Williams' Defender. Did Atari license those names? Or since the Tramiels bought the consumer division, and the consumer division had produced home versions of those games, maybe the licenses remained in effect?

We'd have to look at the exact split, but I believe Atari "proper" kept the rights to the pre-1985 arcade games (save for Marble Madness) and Warners had everything after. That ownership more or less persists to this day, save for assets Atari sold off like Battlezone. 

 

That's why games like Tempest, Missile Command, etc., were obvious targets on the Jaguar since Atari had full rights (and still does, of course, although as we know it's not a straight line to today's iteration of the brand/company). I'm not sure the deal with Defender, but it would have absolutely had to have been licensed since Atari didn't own it. They might have deemed the license worth it with Minter's interest. I'm sure someone has the exact story, though.

[Shaggy the Atarian]

5 hours ago, Wilco said:

I also don’t think Atari Karts looks bad, just a bit odd. There are certainly a lot of colors on screen, but they don’t seem that vibrant to me, more washed out and “realistic” than what I would expect form a kart racer. Take for example the original Mario Kart, when you boot that game up you’ll see loads of colors, lots of karts driving by all with their own animations and some cheery music, in Atari karts you get this with no animation and a not so cheery sounding music track. 

 

The soundtrack sounding like it does certainly sets the tone for the game; It always stood out to me as having a strange "vibe" compared to pretty much any other game on the system. 

 

I suppose a good comparison would be the developer's other kart racing game that they did, Merlin Racing. While obviously derivative of Mario Kart 64, I think they did a better job at sticking to a theme in terms of art direction and music (I also enjoyed things like the space race levels, although those didn't really have much to do with Merlin, nor did things like rockets when it should have been more magical things like fireballs, lightning bolts or something).

7 hours ago, JagChris said:

Only one programmer on this, he probably just used Atari's crappy demo renderer and plugged this game into it.

 

A bit more work and this game probably would have made many people's best of list instead of worst of. 

Ah, I thought it was a bigger team. For a single guy I can give it more leeway. I mean, it still sucks, but it does make you wonder what a full team could have pulled off. 

 

Now we just need someone to do what they did with AvP and port it to Unreal Engine 4

 

32 minutes ago, Editorb said:

Pardon my ignorance (although my ignorance abides and flourishes, pardoned or no), but I've frequently seen laments that Atari did not leverage its valuable old-timey IP. The Tramiels did not want the arcade division, which Warner spun off as Atari Games. Surely AG retained all arcade IP. Yet Atari produced T2K based on arcade Tempest, and Defender 2000, which was baed on Williams' Defender. Did Atari license those names? Or since the Tramiels bought the consumer division, and the consumer division had produced home versions of those games, maybe the licenses remained in effect?

No worries, this often is a source of confusion. The Tramiels had everything that Atari produced from 1972-July 1984. So they could have easily leveraged games like Asteroids, Centipede (those two games being Atari's biggest original titles), Yars' Revenge, Adventure, Star Raiders, Combat, Missile Command, Tempest, Crystal Castles, Haunted House, Major Havoc, I, Robot, etc. No, they couldn't have used arcade games that were released under the Atari Games name (Paperboy, Marble Madness and so on); also Defender was Midway so that was licensed. The confusion gets a bit more complicated when you go into more modern times, since the present Atari sold off BattleZone back in 2012, then all of Atari Games' IP got purchased by Midway in the late 90s, then Midway got bought out by Warner Bros. in '09 or so (few remember this but that is why there was one a PC game for Area 51 or that Gauntlet remake on PC a few years back) 

 

IIRC (YaK could confirm this if true or not), they had seriously considered doing Major Havoc 2000 before going with Defender. It's too bad, MH is one of my favorite Atari titles.

 

The Tramiels also could have used the pinball machines as mentioned, although it's possible they had no clue that was under their purvue. Thanks to the art having been done by people like George Opperman, one could have adapted the worlds setup by some of those into some cool kart tracks:

 

Atari's Middle Earth, nothing to do with Tolkien, but futuristic warriors dealing with dinosaurs. Almost seems like an ahead-of-its-time 90's kids cartoon that took itself a little too seriously. 

 

 

Space Riders (I used to own this one; It could have made for an interesting game in the vein of Super Burnout too, IMO)

 

Airborne Avenger, a kind of futuristic James Bond themed piece

 

 

Time 2000, kind of a weird game, although the butterfly time lady could've made for a track announcer or flag waver or something

Edited February 22, 2022 by Shaggy the Atarian

[Editorb]

Read article about time and its perception that includes this sentence that may explain a lot about the tragic magic of Stuporcross 3D:

 

“If we inject a slight delay between your motor acts and their sensory feedback, we can later make the temporal order of your actions and sensations appear to reverse.”