Indiana Jag is a cancelled mascot platform game in development by french Virtual Xperience around 1994/1995. Five different kind of areas were expected like jungle, Old West, Egypt and Space. As Rodolphe Czuba, Virtual Xperience developer at the time, recalled “only some graphics were done for Indy Jag, a concept like a humorous Indiana Jones with a jaguar figure”.
Information and scans from Joypad issue 34, additional images courtesy of justclaws.atari.org
Images:
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Going off inital press release, game was to use Jaguar hardware for 8 levels of parallax scrolling, as many sprites as possible etc.
Game would of been set over 6 levels.
Virtual Xperience was developing the game at the same time as ZzyorxX II, which was also previewed on the same scan featured on the article. Like it’s stated above, Indiana Jags was going to be a 2D platformer, similar in vein to Rayman in terms of graphics. It was also going to feature 6 levels with multiple varíety in the enviroment of the levels, it was going to be heavy in the parallax department featuring as much as 8 layers of parallax. It was probably canned due to Atari’s lack of interest in 2D games at some point for the system, which also affected Shen Technologies SARL’s Nexus (a Raiden-influenced shoot ’em up). VX was also doing a little Pong game that was never meant to see the light of day…
From developers themselves at the time:
VX JAGUAR *
* Intended titles June 23 1994 *
*********************************************************
includes in the zip file new screenshots of the final graphix of ZzyorxX
and Indiana Jag…
ZZYORXX II : (final name)
ZZYORXX I was the first project (the first sreenshoots) of this shoot’em up, canceled
after we’ve saw RAIDEN II…
– violent shoot’em up like RAIDEN II.
– 5 vertical levels.
– 256 colors.
– screen size : 384×240 pixels.
– left and right scroll : 576 pixels wide.
– 2 parallax scrollings by the GPU.
– shading, zoom, rotation.
– up to 70 sprites per screen by Object Processor and the Blitter.
– 4 music tracks and 2 sound tracks routines by the DSP.
– running in 1 VBL (60 fr/s) !
– one or two players at the same time.
– scores and game settings saved into cartridge.
Preview availibility : JUNE CES (we hope !)
Master code availibility : end of AUGUST
Commercial availibility : NOVEMBER / DECEMBER
INDIANA JAG : (final name ?)
You will live a great adventure. A platform game with five levels using the highs
capacities of the jaguar to display many big sprites at the same time.
During the 5 levels, Indiana Jag (Jaggy) has to fight against many “monsters” like
Dinosaures, hunters, ghosts, mummies, verses, snakes and so…
The greatest features of the game will be, the quality of the animation, the action and
the humour. The action is completed by hidden rooms and a lot of humoristic enemies.
– 256 colors.
– screen size : 384×240 pixels.
– some 16 bits colors sprites.
– 3 differential one pixel fine multi-directional scrollings by the GPU.
– shading, zoom, rotation.
– many sprites on the screen by the Object Processor and the Blitter.
– cartoon quality animation on the principal sprite.
– 4 music tracks and 2 sound tracks routines by the DSP.
– running in 1 VBL (60 fr/s) !
– one player (maybe two).
– scores and game settings saved into cartridge.
Preview availibility : JUNE CES (we hope !)
Master code availibility : end of AUGUST
Commercial availibility : NOVEMBER / DECEMBER
Actual status of the two projects :
The code of the animation is terminated. We are optimizing the GPU scroll routines (it’s
completly into GPU RAM resident and very short : it seems to be magic…).
The code of the sprites management is not terminated but it will be very easy with the
tools we created : a graphic map editor (on falcon) and a sprite management editor (on
falcon). The sprite editor is usable for the two projects and give a file with all the codes
of each sprites like size, position, apparition delay, number of colors, type of colision,
trajectory, and so. The map editor give a file with a table of the code of the graphic block
(16×16 pixels) used in each positions of the screen. On each position, some special
events can be choosed like detection or animation.
We’ve made two music and sound routines by the DSP. The first one can replay Amiga
Protracker (4 voices) and Octalyser (8 voices) files. The first machine time valuation
gave a result of 2% of the VBL with 8 tracks at 33 kHz. It’s possible to add sounds effects
or adjust volume and balance. The second one is a FM sound routine wich can replay
Atari ST soundchip or Amiga TFMX files.
We are developping a Jaguar FM sound editor on Falcon.
The graphics of Indiana Jag are in progress : we can now map an average of 100 screens
of the game. Eight animations (12 frame/s) of Jaggy are in progress (walk, run, jump,
climb, fall, fight, and so…)
The graphics of ZZYORXX II are in progress : flying objects and a partial map.
The musics of ZZYORXX II are terminated. Not the sounds.
The musics and sounds of Indiana Jag are in progress.
I’ve seen (unconfirmed) claims both this and ZZYORXX II were canned after Atari’s marketing department decided 2D games were not wanted for the Jaguar, instead Atari should focus on 3D titles to match 3DO, Saturn etc.