Game preservation has lead to some incredibly interesting and unique discoveries regarding gaming's storied history, especially with the more obscure systems that did not sell well when they were released. As it turned out, an almost unknown arcade ride could be key to yet another piece of the Atari Jaguar's history.
The Atari Jaguar, in the 1990s, was mostly known for marketing itself on being 64-bit. Despite its supposed power, the exclusive games were never enough to attract the sales numbers its competitors did, and since then it has mostly fallen into obscurity.
With the obscurity of the Atari Jaguar, it makes sense that the games for it would be even less well known, so Gaming Alexandria's release of one with an especially hazy history provides a lot to dig into. The game, Speedster II, was originally unearthed at an auction in 2001 and was actually created as a hybrid of an arcade racing game and a children's ride, meant to be played in a cabinet with a physical seat that would move around with the car.
While the game is simple, its history is very much not so; it was developed by a company called Carousel, well known for its other "kiddie ride" products before it began development on two more arcade-style games to keep up with a changing market. Licensing the Atari Jaguar's hardware while it was busy being a total market failure would have been a smart move for Carousel, as it was a cheap way to gain access to established hardware instead of developing original hardware on top of already having to create software. A programmer who worked on the games says Speedster II was completed around late 1995, but reports conflict on whether the ride actually saw release.
The prototype cartridge itself has an interesting history even without the further context of it being a kiddie ride; despite it becoming a collector's item, as many prototypes do, the ROM would not be dumped and preserved from its initial discovery in 2001 all the way to January 2022. Gaming Alexandria claims that reproduction cartridges circulated through Atari collectors, which if true would be frustrating to game preservationists; collectors hoarding prototypes and selling them for exorbitant prices is a massive barrier to preservation, especially since the aging hardware could easily fail at any time even if stored in the safest conditions.
Even if Speedster II may not be a very interesting game by itself, with the gameplay involving simple left and right dodging of objects on the road, its history provides an interesting look into the unclear life of an obscure game made for commercially unsuccessful hardware. While this may not have been a prototype of a better-known game, it still offers an intriguing glimpse into the history of Atari gaming hardware.