Conan is a cancelled beat ’em up similar to Golden Axe that was in development by Arcade Zone for the Atari Jaguar. The french studio was closed down after Sony decided to not publish their latest Super Nintendo game, as the original Playstation arrived in Europe. Without another publisher they had to give up on releasing Nightmare Busters SNES and Arcade Zone had to shut down. Conan Jaguar vanished with their closure and it’s unknown how much of the game was finished before the cancellation.
At 1Up Games can read an interview with former Arcade Zone’s developers, in which they mention this unreleased beat ’em up:
Lyes Belaidouni: We even made an attempt on the Atari Jaguar, the stillborn console for which we developed (without bragging) the most beautiful beat’em up with huge sprites and monumental backgrounds ! But this, alas, no one has seen it…
Celine was able to find some screenshots of the game in magazines CD Consoles #2, #5 and GF #95
Images:
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Nightmare Buster’s publisher , at least in Japan, was Nichibutsu.
:-( I conacted Carlo Perconti a few months back, who seemed keen to answer questions on Jaguar Conan (and other titles he worked on) so fired across a mini-interview, had a few emails back saying he was too busy to get to them, but would as soon as he could, then nothing.
No reply to a few ‘chase’ emails either so fear i might of hit a dead end…
Just when i’d abandoned all hope of finding out more, 1 last attempt at contacting coder gave me this:
Sorry for the trouble, We actually had a hard-disk crash on our email server and I lost almost all the emails, finally today I have been able to recover everything after battling with old backup merge, also the email server moved a lot of emails in the meantime to its junk folder so they got filtered when they should have not been. Can you please resend me again the questions and I will review them on Thursday since I am out of the office tomorrow and Wednesday is National Holiday in Japan.
So, questions sent, fingers crossed :-)
Update:Fantastic news…’Full’ details on what happened have been passed onto me and in turn pased onto Unseen 64, but long story short, game NEVER got beyond the mere ‘Demo’ stage, so ignore ALL claims of levels completed, as that’s FALSE.All source code (sadly) lost.Unseen64 will soon share the full story with you, i’m sure.
From Coder himself: (there’s about 50% more info in hans on Unseen64, but this’ll quench part of yet thirst :-) ).
We got involved developing on the jaguar after we met some key people at
one of the CES show in LasVegas (I do not recall who exactly). Lyes and
I we were impressed by the concept of the GPU Jaguar, an unique list
processor which could allow huge sprites to be drawn on screen and which
broke the limitation of number of hardware sprites on 1 video line like
We used to have back then on the SNES. So at first We decided to develop
a new graphic engine based on multiple layer of sprites on PC, then
through Arcade Zone We got access to one of the Jaguar Hardware and then
We started to port the beginning of a “first possible” level of what We
wanted to demonstrate based on a CONAN character (but really it was only
to show up the engine, no license was signed yet at that time). For
sure, back to that period, We got many inspiration from the Big Coin-Up
Arcade titles like GoldenAxe and alike…….
@Akkroid.Not sure if your a PS3 owner? but if so…might i suggest Dragons Crown? playing it myself at present, kind of modern ‘Golden Axe’ and bloody marvelous it is too boot :-)
I found a few compuserve posters comments from early 1995, where they gave feedback on the 1 level demo they had played.1 felt the graphics looked great, but the controls needed tweaking and another felt the backgrounds and characters looked very 16 bit, but complained more about the music sounding very hissy.
Thought it important to mention these comments as you don’t get this level of user interaction from the brief video clips that are available online.
New direct-feed footage of Konan was found by YouTuber Rill!!! Check it out folks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEGbuOAoZVk&feature=youtu.be&t=569&fbclid=IwAR04xIGaIpDNKgAixV1Mi5-K7Mwbk9Pqr6i9GLJez21EliMRerz4FPhzCZ0