Phase Zero
Phase Zero — frequently asked questions
- Is Phase Zero on Steam?
- No. Phase Zero is not distributed on Steam, so there is no Steam Charts or SteamDB player count for it. Its live popularity is tracked here via Twitch viewership instead.
- What platforms is Phase Zero on?
- Phase Zero is available on Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari Jaguar.
About Phase Zero
Phase Zero is an unreleased action-shooter video game that was in development by Hyper Image Productions and originally planned to be published by Atari Corporation on a scheduled September 1995 release date exclusively for the Atari Jaguar. It was the only game in development by Hyper Image. Assuming the role of a newcomer pilot from the titular squadron assigned to fight against an rival organization only known as The Collective in a foreign planet, players take control of a windowless VTV hovertank craft called Hunter in order to complete a series of missions and tasks, while battling against enemy VTV hovertanks. Hyper Image was originally working on a top-down shooter for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, before the team later moved to the Jaguar with Phase Zero and opted to use their own interpretation of the heightmap technique to render the landscapes and visuals, in addition of also placing emphasis on LAN play for multiplayer.
Summary via IGDB.
Phase Zero on Wikipedia
Phase Zero is an unfinished shooter video game that was being developed by Hyper Image Productions and would have been published by Atari for the Atari Jaguar. Set in the future on a terrestrial planet, the player takes on the role of a newcomer to the Phase Zero squad, piloting a hovercraft to fight rival corporate states. The player is tasked with various objectives while fighting enemies in multiple missions.
Source: Wikipedia (text under CC BY-SA 4.0).
Game details
- Developer
- Hyper Image Productions
- Publisher
- Atari Corporation
- Themes
- Action
Details via IGDB.
Every version compared
Prices, contemporary reception and the studio credited for each release
| Platform | Year | Loose | Complete | Sealed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atari Jaguar | 2002 | $65 | $143 | $292 |
Also released on: Super Nintendo Entertainment System. We haven’t priced or authenticated that version yet.
Collector value & authenticity
Atari Jaguar · PriceCharting sold data · Verified 2026-07-24
- Region
- WW
- Released
- 2002
- Authenticity
- Med
A cancelled Jaguar shooter designed by the man who later led Android's Material Design.
Phase Zero's designer was Matías Duarte — later of Palm's webOS and Google's Material Design, one of the most influential interface designers of the smartphone era. Produced by Ted Tahquechi (Cybermorph, Kasumi Ninja), it's a 3D hovercraft shooter that died when Atari's 1996 layoffs took its producer and Hyper Image suspended production waiting for direction that never came. A build leaked in 2000; Songbird's Carl Forhan tracked down former staff, secured rights, and published it with B&C ComputerVisions in 2002.
How it was made
Hyper Image Productions developed the Atari Jaguar version, published by Songbird Productions. Credited: directed by Paul Good; designed by Matías Duarte; art by Matías Duarte; music by Andy Carlson.
Cartridge & preservation record
Cartridge ROM capacity 16 megabit (2 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
- Funded with a car-accident settlement, by students on a hiatus. Hyper Image Productions was formed in Maryland in 1994 by Jeremy Gordon, Matías Duarte and the brothers Otávio and Paul Good, who took an academic hiatus to do it. Paul put in the insurance money he had received after a car accident years earlier. They then moved out of an apartment and into a house shared with four more of the team — Bill Lanides, Andy Carlson, Sterling Krauss and an intern known only as Damian.
- Two of its authors went on to shape how phones look and translate. Duarte is the name usually attached to this game, but he was not the only one. Otávio Good — one of the two brothers who founded Hyper Image — went on to create Word Lens, the live augmented-reality translation app that Google acquired in 2014. Two people from a nine-person Maryland outfit making an unreleased Jaguar shooter ended up shaping how a phone looks and how it reads the world through a camera.
- It was a Super NES game until they saw the Jaguar. It began as a top-down shooter with exploration elements, aimed at the Super NES. Hyper Image changed target after signing as a licensed Jaguar developer, and were explicit about why: they judged the hardware genuinely powerful, and they found Atari supportive of small teams. Both halves of that reasoning are worth noting, because the second is the one Atari is least often credited with.
Before you buy
This is a released demo of an unfinished game, not a completed one — describing it otherwise is the fastest route to a dispute, and a seller who's vague about that is a red flag about how well they know what they're selling. Post-commercial release; verify availability before paying rarity prices.
Authenticity & condition — Atari Jaguar
Specific to the format this title shipped in
Buying a Jaguar cartridge
Cartridges are the durable half of this library — the risk is provenance, not decay. The platform has an active post-commercial scene, so the question is usually which era a cartridge is from rather than whether it still works.
- Ask for a photo of the label edge and the cartridge back. Reproductions are usually printed on adhesive photo stock and sit proud of the label recess.
- Donor shells are the common trick: sanding marks on the back, or adhesive ghosting where an older label was lifted, are the strongest signals.
- Cartridges are region-free on this platform, so a cheaper PAL copy plays on a North American console — a price difference is not evidence of a fake.
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