BattleSphere

How it was made

What the press said at the time

Cartridge & preservation record

Cartridge ROM capacity 32 megabit (4 MB), measured from the preserved cartridge image.

Cartridge data from the No-Intro preservation database (metadata only — names, sizes and checksums, no game data).

Worth knowing

• Eight Jaguars, four months, one signature. BattleSphere was published in 2000, after Atari was gone, so it could not be officially approved — and the Jaguar refuses to boot a cartridge whose contents do not match a hash in its header. To get a legitimate cartridge to run, the 4-Play team brute-forced it, running eight Jaguar consoles around the clock for more than four months trying byte combinations until one produced a passing signature. The encryption keys were not released publicly until Curt Vendel and the Classic Gaming Expo published them between 2001 and 2003 — a year or more too late to help.
• Singularity, then Star Battle, then BattleSphere. It was conceived in 1993 and revealed at Summer CES 1994 as Star Battle — a name chosen in honour of a mainframe game Scott Le Grand had written in high school in the 1980s — after starting life as Singularity. It acquired its final title at Winter CES 1995 and was still being shown at JagFest '97, '98 and '99.
• Built in spare time, over seven years, with no investment. Every member of 4Play had a full-time job. They began in 1994 with no outside funding, estimating twelve to eighteen months, and finally published in 2000 — after Hasbro Interactive declared the Jaguar an open platform. Their cited influences were Star Raiders, Doom, TIE Fighter and Iron Soldier, with the networking model taken from Netrek.
• One of its authors built the peripheral it runs on. Tom Harker, one of the four, designed the CatBox — the unlicensed LAN and AV interface for the Jaguar. BattleSphere supports up to sixteen players over a local network, and is one of only three games on the entire platform with any link-cable support at all.