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Atari Mascot Character Game
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Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari
State of completion: Concept work started.
Genre: Platform game.
Also planned or released for: PC
Notes: Game is not listed in the Atari Dealer Price List Q3/1995.
Atari management decided that the reason that Sega and Nintendo were doing
so well wasn't good game design or third party developer support, it was
their cool mascot characters. The art department was tasked with coming up
with a mascot character, one that was distinctly American in flavor and
would make a good plushy. (I'm not kidding!) Various designers/artists
spent two weeks sketching, then presented what we'd done to management.
They scratched their heads and asses and said they'd get back to them.
Turns out they didn't like any of them, and they scrapped the whole
project. It never got far enough to even think about the "cartridge vs.
CD" question, nor did gameplay become a topic other than they wanted a
platform hopper since that's what Sonic was.
'Al E. Gator' was one of the suggested characters, a rather nasty
attourney alligator - fitting, eh?
(Email conversation with B.J. West,1999)
CR: How about Black ICE\White Noise?
FT: Well, that was meant to be kind of the big Atari internally-produced
big, big-effort game that was going to put Atari back on the map. It
basically started from Sam Tramiel, the president of Atari mandating that
we create our own Sonic, Mario, iconic character and basically what
happened was we went through many iterations of these kind of really lame
mascot-characters, from ducks to alligators to... it was all very
ridiculous. I don't think anybody was ever terribly enthused by all these
pre-mascot-things so we wanted to do something a little bit edgier. So we
came up with the concept Black ICE\White Noise which was, you know, a very
innovative concept at the time, in many aspects it was like The Matrix
before that ever came out.
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