SuperCross 3D

How it was made

What the press said at the time

The contemporary press could not agree on this one: comparable scores run from 14% to 60% across 10 publications. Scores are printed in their original scales.

Cartridge & preservation record

Cartridge ROM capacity 16 megabit (2 MB), measured from the preserved cartridge image.

Catalogue part number J9044E

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

Worth knowing

• One of the first Jaguar games rendered on SGI hardware. Tiertex Design Studios, who had already ported Flashback to the Jaguar, texture-mapped the 3D track models and pre-rendered the bikes and riders using The Advanced Visualizer — making this one of the earliest Jaguar titles to use Silicon Graphics rendering in its art pipeline. Programmer Brunning recalled the Jaguar's DSP being awkward to work with: its limited memory meant constantly switching routines, so code had to be written in small chunks that loaded and executed asynchronously.
• It got to ECTS because something else fell through. Announced at an official Atari GEnie roundtable in December 1994 for a Q3 1995 release, demonstrated at Atari's Fun 'n' Games Day press event, and exhibited at the 1995 Toy Test run by CBS This Morning at the Pacific Science Center. Its appearance at the Autumn 1995 ECTS was a last-minute substitution — another Atari title was not ready in time. Its Atari co-producers were Tom Gillen, who had run the test department before moving to a sports producer role, Faran Thomason of Cybermorph and Bubsy, and Vince Zampella, who had come from GameTek and also produced Baldies.