1994 Atari
Platform: Atari Jaguar
Battlezone 2000 was one of the early planned titles for the Atari Jaguar and mentioned in various magazines over a period of time, but it was never to surface – or did it in some form at least?
It is suggested that Battlezone 2000 was later reworked into Hover Strike, a futuristic tank battle game – which certainly matches up. However, Leonard Tramiel has claimed that both games were entirely separate, which has caused some conflict of information.
There is a suggestion that both games were even advertised side by side – was that the case? (we weren’t able to find an advert showing both together at the time of writing). If so, does it mean that an original Battlezone development was scrapped and replaced by a separate and unrelated development that was Hover Strike?
There are suggestions that the game may have simply been renamed/re-branded after it was felt the basic Battlezone mechanics had been played around with too much, so much so that it was almost unrecognizable as a Battlezone game. Was that perhaps the case?
Many questions to answer – but hopefully one of the developers from Hover Strike will be able to confirm in the future. Though there is an interesting curiosity which may reveal the answer, as thankfully Matt Buchanan-Smith recovered and released the source code to Hover Strike back in 2017.
We took a look through the source code, and found a few mentions in the code comments of “Battlezone” with phrases such as “BattleZone Modifications” and “Battlezone specific – Start of envelopes” and a date of June 1994. Does that prove anything? It seems it did, as contributor Michael has also highlighted that Atari Explorer Online showed some of the game as captured at the Summer CES in 1994:
What would be very interesting though is to try and see if anything exists of the game in its original Battlezone form. One of the early title screens shown in adverts seems to show something which was much closer to the original, and far from the more modern design of Hover Strike.
Does that version still exist for instance and how different was it to the game we ended up with? It would be great to find out and experience it for ourselves. If you know anything more about this development, or were involved on Hover Strike – please do get in touch.
On a side note, its worth mentioning that the Atari Lynx edition had a complete fully 3D game hidden away in its release. It seems it was deemed too hard, so the final game was simplified and made more like the arcade original. Here is a video that showcases the amazing hidden version.
With thanks to Ross Sillifant for the suggestion of covering and gathered information, Michael for the video highlight, Archive.org for various scans and to Matt Buchanan-Smith for the Hover Strike source code.
Great research, everyone!
Some footage was shown at Summer CES 1994 and fortunately captured by Atari Explorer Online for a VHS they sold to subscribers. You can see it in action starting at 01:47:14 here: https://youtu.be/hprueLJ5JDY?feature=shared&t=6430
I’m sure they’d just barely gotten it together enough to preview, but it does look like an early version of what became Hover Strike.
That’s brilliant Michael – thank you very much for sharing, i’ll embed that in now and that does indeed (along with the source code note) confirm that Hover Strike was what the game evolved into.