Bomberman Legends

Gameplay screenshot from one of the recently revealed beta builds.

Bomberman Legends is an action-maze game that plays very similarly like other games in the Bomberman franchise. There were going to be two gameplay modes: a single-player story mode,[7] which took elements from titles of the series that were released at the time such as Super Bomberman and Bomberman '93, with plans to feature an extensive story-line and cutscenes, and a multiplayer mode which supports up to eight players by plugging two Team Tap multitaps into the console.[3] Before starting a multiplayer match, players would have the choice to customize their Bomberman character with power-ups.[2]

According to Mike Mika, one of the original programmers for the project, him and his colleagues were still in college with their studies but they had aspirations of entering into the video game industry.[3] In 1994, the group traveled to Las Vegas and formed a game development company to discuss with multiple console manufacturers at SCES '94 and obtain a development kit in order to begin working on titles for systems that were still active on the market, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System.[3][6] The team approached to Atari Corporation and began discussing with Jeff Minter, known for his work in Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar, who recommended them to speak with Atari Corp. representative Normen Kowalewski, which in turn he told them to meet him behind the scenes at a hotel. When the group arrived to the location, Atari had a Jaguar development setup along with a prototype of the Atari Jaguar CD add-on for demonstration purposes to third-party developers.[3] Interested in acquiring a development kit for the system, the team spoke with company representatives in regards to the subject and reached an agreement, purchasing and receiving various hardware kits to program games for the system.[3]

During a brainstorming session, the team originally had plans to create an project that was a spoof of the damsel in distress plot found in various titles at the time, but the idea was later discarded after publishers showed little interest in it, however, they later settled down in creating a Bomberman title as their "dream game", with Mike himself contacting Hudson Soft via online in regards to develop a title of the series for the Jaguar.[3] He discussed with an employee of the company named Bill Rich and told that Atari was interested in acquiring the rights of the series, with the latter agreeing to do so after speaking with Hudson, and the team started development of Bomberman Legends between late 1994 and early 1995.[3] The development team took care in making the title as faithful to the series, by looking at Super Bomberman 2 on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as the standard, while they sent notes to Hudson in regards as to how they approached its development.[3]

Sometime during development, Mike and his team received a telephone call from then-Atari Corporation vice-president in third-party development Bill Rehbock, who told to them if they could remove any reference to Bomberman due to monetary issues that Atari was having during this period and make it an original property instead.[3] A few days later, the team received another call from Bill, who told them that Atari was preparing to stop support for the Jaguar and cancelled upcoming projects for the system,[8] including Bomberman Legends and Atari merged with JT Storage in a reverse takeover on April 1996.[3][6][9][10][11] Prior to its discontinuation, the team managed to get the multiplayer mode working, while the single-player mode had just begun development.[3] It was never advertised or mentioned in any publication during its development.