Cybermorph
1993 · Shooter · Atari Jaguar
Overview
Cybermorph (1993) was the Atari Jaguar's North American pack-in game: a polygonal flight shooter in which a morphing fighter recovers pods across 40 planets, guided by the AI voice Skylar.
Deep Dive
The player pilots the TransmoGriffon, a shape-changing attack craft, against the Pernitia empire, recovering pods across five sectors of eight planets each, some 50 levels in all. Skylar, an artificial intelligence built into the ship, comments on the action in sampled speech. The game draws its landscapes with Gouraud-shaded polygons, roughly 400 to 600 at a time, at 10 to 18 frames per second.
Developer Story
Atari's own testers designed the levels while Attention to Detail built the terrain and enemies, finishing the game while the Jaguar hardware itself was still being finalised. It shipped with the console in North America on 23 November 1993. Critics were divided, and the Jaguar CD sequel Battlemorph followed in 1995.
Did You Know?
- Its engine began as a landscape demo that Attention to Detail wrote in 11 days for the never-released Konix Multisystem, based on David Braben's Zarch.
- The 1994 reissue shrank the cartridge from 2 MB to 1 MB, dropping the intro animation, the music and some of Skylar's lines.
Sources & further reading
- Cybermorph — Wikipedia
