Unseen News

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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