Finish Him! The last Atari Jaguar title
Fight for Life is where my Jaguar fighting series really ends. This is the last title ever officially published for the Atari Jaguar and the last game Atari produced before being liquidated by JT Storage, a hardware production company. In 1998, Hasbro Interactive acquired all Atari Corporation related properties from JTS, creating a new subsidiary, Atari Interactive. Atari as a name has a complicated history and Fight for Life marked the end of one of the most turbulent and ambitious periods; bringing 64-bits to home consoles.
Fight for Life was essentially developed by one person, Francois Bertrand after his work on Virtua Fighter with Sega Japan. From his own interviews it’s clear that the biggest limitation for the game was the platform itself. The Jaguar couldn’t compete with Sega and Playstation on 3D games. Fight for Life is a great example however, of what the Atari Jaguar could do. For the platform, the 3D models look good and the gameplay flows consistently.
Fight for Life didn’t do well. On the Atari Jaguar it looks great compared to Kasumi Ninja and Ultra Vortek. It also feels like a more balanced fighting title. But by 1996 it was competing with bigger teams working on better hardware. What we do get is a great example of the Atari Jaguar hardware pushed hard. We get a decent 2-Player, fully polygonal 3D title and those were sorely lacking in the Atari Jaguar’s library.
I also really appreciated who much effort went into the story, the artwork and the overall package. The game consists of eight different fighters from around the world who all died on the same day. Now they’re fighting for a second chance at life against a shape-morphing demon. As you progress through the game you slowly collect moves stolen from your competition to develop your ultimate fighter.
After every stage you get a password that will allow you to use your character with those stolen moves to try tournament mode again, or go up against a friend in two-player mode. The manual also gave me a hint about replay mode. Being a fully 3D title, Fight for Life gives you total control of the camera system. When checking out your replay, you can zoom in, around, up and down. It really helped me appreciate how much work into developing a game like this for the Jaguar.
Fight for Life was born at an incredibly turbulent time at Atari and it shows. The game was developed (directed, designed and coded) by Francois Bertrand after his work on Sega’s Virtua Fighter. With competition like Virtua Fighter and Tekken, Fight for Life had a tough fight. The lack of resources as Atari closed its doors is obvious. There’s actually a Fight for Life BETA version floating around which is considered to be visually better. This version may have been a ‘preview’ sent to magazines at the time. Considering Fight for Life was developed primarily by one person in 18 months, it’s pretty impressive for the hardware. One of the few games to use full polygons and run at a consistent frame rate. You can read Bertrand’s interview over here.
Fight for Life is a great example of what the Atari Jaguar could do, but there’s plenty of other unique titles that make it a fun system to collect for, including Skyhammer, Iron Soldier, Doom, Alien vs Predator. The Atari Jaguar is a fun console to review because there were so many unique games for the system and for a long time, it was an incredibly difficult system to emulate. Thankfully, we have a few more options now, like BigPEmu. It’s easier than ever to check out the full collection of Atari Jaguar games at home.