Unreleased Jaguar Game for Sale, Expensive

Black Ice, White Noise was an ambitious 3D adventure game for the Jaguar CD that was canceled by publisher Atari right around its Alpha phase. It is an interesting historical footnote for two reasons, the first being that this dark and seedy (and extremely expensive) cyberpunk thing was an internal response to Sam Tramiel mandating a new mascot for the Atari brand (the lady in the red jacket, I guess?), and second because it is a third person 3D game where the main character explores a large 3D city by either walking or stealing cars, designed several years before that one game came out that all the other games copied for a while.

The game itself is old news for readers of [insert credit], but today I learned via gameSniped that copies of Alpha builds of the game are for sale at unreasonably high prices! You can pay $1,500 on eBay, if you’d like, or you can buy direct from the licensed distributor. There are two separate builds of the game - both are in Alpha, and while one is more feature-complete, the earlier one crashes less often. For some reason both builds are $30 each, and you can’t get a deal on a bundle, so I guess you can either spend $60 to get all you can out of the experience or choose what’s more important to you, less crashes or features like “the infamous ‘Zebra Hooker.’” You can also get the soundtrack for $20, which was written by the guy who wrote Herb Alpert’s Rise and, if his disgrace-to-god website is to be believed, Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize. He did some other game music too - the video game discography is kind of hidden on his site, but you can see it here. Before you get excited, no, he didn’t do the soundtrack to The Adventures of Batman and Robin on the Genesis, he composed the music for the beautifully animated cutscenes in the Sega CD version that sounded nothing at all like the music from the show.

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