Chaos Agenda (Black ICE White Noise) [Atari Jaguar – Unreleased]

Chaos Agenda (Black ICE White Noise) [Atari Jaguar – Unreleased]

Black ICE / White Noise (originally known as Chaos Agenda) is a cancelled action game that was in development for the Jaguar.

In 1995 Atari corporation was desperately rushing to keep their Jaguar system alive and in competition with the next generation of gaming systems such as the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation. Atari promised a Virtual Reality helmet and cd add on in order to try and keep up with Sony and Sega.

Unfortunately the VR helmet was canceled due to how expensive production of the unit would have been. However the cd add on eventually made it into mass production and was released in mid 1995 along with about 15 games and promises of more to come such as Jack Nicklaus Cyber Golf which was canceled and Atari’s major in house project for christmas 95. Originally Atari planned to release a platforming mascot game which would rival Sega’s Sonic or Nintendo’s Mario.

Some designs that were suggested were ducks, alligators and armadillos but none of these mascots ever caught on so Atari decided to go with a more adult cyberpunk game that would star a “slick, stylin’ Aresenio Hall-esque black hacker dude, a beautiful, ass-kicking Japanese female street samurai, and a long-haired, mirrorshaded, leather-jacketed caucasian borderline alcoholic burnout” (copy and pasted from an inteview with one of the game’s designers).

The game would have been quite similar to Grand Theft Auto 3 in that the player could wander through a huge city and either talk to people or shoot them and would have featured a fully 3d environment as well as fmv cutscenes.

Players could have stolen a futuristic air car and gone for a joy ride or gone on foot. Players could also use something called “My first deck” in the game in order to jack into something called the the C net which would allow players to hack into companies c space in order to access information, get addresses or look for job opportunities. Players could then accept missions from a variety of different characters.

Missions included finding someone in C net, hacking into a part of C net to get information, destroying a renegade C net program, Breaking into a building to rescue someone and successfully take then back to safety, or taking out a gang.

The game takes place 40 years in the future in the city of New San Francisco where a large company known as Megasoft is attempting to gain control of the C net and apparently the world. In the game you could either work with Megasoft or against them.

If you blast a couple of cops and they begin chasing you all over the city you could simply enter the C net and hack the police data base to get rid of your police record. Or you could do a favor for the government to get your record wiped clean.

Unfortunately the game was not to be, after Atari laid off an integral part of the Black ICE/White Noise development team a Christmas release slipped away and instead the game was targeted for a July 1996 release.

However very quickly more team members were laid off as Atari went further and further into bankruptcy. Finally, the game was canceled and drifted into gaming history.

However recently two different prototype builds of the game have surfaced / leaked and are available for purchase for your Jaguar CD system! One build is Revision 18. Although this build does not have as many features as the other available build it is much more stable and does not crash as much. The other available build is Revision 23, the last build of the game produced. Although there are several new features such as the infamous “zebra hooker” this build is much more unstable.

The official soundtrack (created by Andy Armer) is also available for purchase since it was never implemented into the game.

Article written by Conkerfan

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U64 Staff & Contributors




13 thoughts on “Chaos Agenda (Black ICE White Noise) [Atari Jaguar – Unreleased]

  1. Matt

    This was later named Black Ice White Noise. One of the people who was responsible for this game sells official copies of the the final revision of this game which is playable to some extent. It’s probably 30% complete but it’s a good example of what could have been.

    http://www.strafe.com/BIWN/

    1. monokoma

      Thanks for the infos Matt, i’ll update the description asap =) I like when cancelled games are released.. i wonder if this one is fun to play… it does not look very good to be honest

  2. Adam

    Rev. 23 is the best looking one but it crashes more than Rev. 18 or 19. There’s no game there, so the only value this has is exploring the vast city and finding little things here and there. It probably would have been a cool exclusive game for the Jag had they finished it.

  3. Astrobeej

    BTW: We *were* in negotiations to get a soundtrack from NIN, but that never happened (the company cheaped out!) The actual soundtrack was composed and performed by Grammy nominee Andy Armer.

  4. ctomp

    Finally picked up a copy of version 18 and liked it. I plan on ordering 23 in the future. It’s a shame that it wasn’t finished.

  5. psvitagamer2012

    Yeah, this was a neat little stillborn project from Atari that was WAY ahead of it’s time in 1995! I feel quite privileged to own all of it. It’s very lucky to even still exist after the closure of Atari and the project being killed in September 1995. I feel VERY PRIVILEGED to own all 24 revisions, sourcecode, and the soundtrack to it. I wanted to preserve some true Atari
    history and not see it lost to obscurity and the sands of time! Atari invested some $5 million dollars in this before they threw it to the wolves and in the trash. I thought, that it deserved much better than that treatment by them, it was completely saved as a museum piece for the gaming masses! I hate to see things go to waste. This was a crowning
    achievement shortly before the death of Atari Corp/Atari Interactive! Truly sad that it wasn’t finished or released to us…

  6. R

    More stuff has popped out about BIWN such as how the map originally was laid out, vehicle models, shots of the production and more + a little extra.

  7. KGRAMR

    AtariAge user marss discovered a few years ago the ftp address of a Jaguar fan that contained all the video clips of Black ICE\White Noise, which is necessary for the creator (B.J. West) to finish what he started, alongside the source code. marss unfortunately didn’t managed to bookmark that ftp address so me and him are struggling to find it…I’ll list the stuff that has popped up for BI\WN in 2017 soon ;-)

  8. Ross Sillifant

    Black Ice/White Noise was no where near being completed. Definately
    under 50% done. When I got layed off last January in the big layoff,
    the only game in test that was close to being done was Breakout 2000,
    nothing else was very close, so any other incomplete games would
    require quite a bit of work to complete. Also, almost all cancelled
    games were nowhere near being completed and would require a lot of
    work to finish. After the amount of time that has passed on all of
    them, it wouldn’t be worth it to start them up again since the
    programmers have moved on to other projects. It would be easier and
    cheaper to start a whole new title than it would to pick up where
    someone left off on one of the killed titles.

    That said, I can’t wait to see the Telegames titles, espicially Zero 5
    if the rumors are true. That game looked like a LOT of fun.

    Dan McNamee Atari

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