Tempest 2000

How it was made

What the press said at the time

Cartridge & preservation record

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

Catalogue part number J9010

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

How the Atari Jaguar version differs

The Jaguar cartridge is the original — every other version is a port of it, and the PlayStation release was redesigned enough to be retitled Tempest X3.

High Voltage Software's Saturn conversion stays close to the Jaguar version but removes the third type of bonus level.

Four tracks from the commercially released Tempest 2000 soundtrack are not in the game: Thermal Resolution, T2K, Ease Yourself and Tracking Depth were cut for cartridge space. Atari sold the full soundtrack separately on CD.

The standing criticism of the Jaguar version is the lack of a rotary controller. Atari planned one and no prototype is known to exist, so it is played on the standard pad.

Reviewing the later ports, GameSpot and GamePro both said they added too little over the by-then two-year-old Jaguar version; Sega Saturn Magazine called the Saturn port slightly inferior to the Jaguar original.

Also on other platforms

Macintosh · Microsoft Windows · MS-DOS · PlayStation · Sega Saturn

Worth knowing

• The Jaguar's own creator told Minter it was a poor demo of the hardware. At the console's New York launch party the Jaguar's creator took Jeff Minter aside to tell him that Tempest 2000 was a poor demonstration of what the machine could do. Minter finished it anyway, and thirty years later it is the one Jaguar game nobody argues about — while the titles built to show off the hardware are the ones people forget.
• It supports a rotary controller Atari never made. The most common complaint about the Jaguar version was the absence of a spinner like the 1981 arcade cabinet's. The game was in fact programmed with rotary-controller support built in; Atari simply never released the controller, so the option sat in the code with no hardware to answer it.
• The Japanese release came with its own manual. Mumin Corporation published it in Japan with a Japanese-language manual produced for that market. That matters beyond this game: whether Japanese Jaguar releases were genuine local products or Western stock pushed over an Akihabara counter is an open question, and a region-specific manual is evidence for the former on at least one title.
• Four games in one cartridge, including a duel mode. Electronic Games catalogued the modes in May 1994: Tempest 2000 itself, Traditional Tempest — "a classy reiteration of the '81 coin-op, featuring graphics which virtually duplicate the original's" — Tempest Plus, and Tempest Duel. Duel is the two-player mode Atari's own advertising flagged as "an optional two-player mode", and it is the reason the cartridge is worth owning even for someone who only wants the 1981 game.