Prototype Uncovered: Atari Games’ JAMMIN

It has been a long while since we had news on a never-released arcade game and its prototype, but over the years we have covered several. Those include: Dropzone Arcade; Atari’s Arrk Arrh; and Kung Fu Master 2, among many others. We even have a section dedicated to unreleased/prototype games as you might have seen. I have always found prototypes to be fascinating, although it sucks when what looked to be a good game got shelved for one reason or another.

Today’s prototype news covers yet another game from one of the largest sources of unreleased games, Atari Games. Let’s check out JAMMIN’…

What Was JAMMIN’?

Back in the mid-80s it was a tumultuous time for Atari, as the company had been split in 1984. However, many of the people who were a part of the company before the schism as a part of the coin-op department remained. Without the weight of the home divisions to wear them down, and seeing some new investments (and part ownership) come in from Namco, that meant that they were able to continue innovating. They launched their System I & II hardware platforms starting with Marble Madness on System I in December 1984, and they were also busy working on some other neat ideas, including a full 3D polygon racing game called Air Race, which never saw the light of day.

Somewhere around that time, the company was looking into ways to create what would have been among the very first rhythm games. Perhaps the first concept to come along in this regard would have used motion sensors and laserdiscs in the Atari Dance Machine. Whether the people who made that were involved with JAMMIN’ is unknown at this time, but JAMMIN’ was in development in 1985, and involved one Robert Weatherby. It also apparently made it as far as testing, although presumably it failed the test and that’s why it was never released.

From some early and poor quality prototype footage that the now defunct Atarigames.com had shared, we knew that the game had existed, and that it was headed in the direction of something like Simon Says. The band in the game would be doing a recording session, and after the drums would play certain sequences, the goal was for you to repeat the same sequence without a mistake. There were a total of nine buttons you would use as representative of the instruments in the game:

The one problem like with many prototypes is that there were no ROMs of the prototype around that could be used to glean more info – we just had this blurry footage to go off of… until now.

JAMMIN’ Discovered

Per these social posts by David Haywood, ““Jammin” was recovered from old VAX backup tapes by Dutchman2000 and SynaMax (a few bytes did need to be fixed manually) I’ve emulated it. Actually runs on something derived from Donkey Kong“. Dutchman2000 posted the work on this Arcade-Museum forums thread, and it’s been getting a bit of attention from there.

Apparently, there are several other prototypes they are working on in the mix too, including one I’d never heard of before called EVOLUTION – which might have been like the PC game Spore, decades before the latter was released. Atari sure was ahead of their time in many ways. There was also one called OFF-ROAD, but it appears that with all of those games, it’s extremely difficult to salvage the code and get it into a format that works with modern hardware. We’ll stay tuned – if either of those or the Garfield, Gremlins, or E.T. Arcade Game ever come to light, those would be just as interesting to find out more about.

David worked to get this up and running in MAME and has provided some footage up for our enjoyment, which provides the best ever look at this game which was not to be. It also clears up exactly how the game would play.

The use of Donkey Kong hardware is a bit of a surprise – I always thought it was a System I/II game, especially given the look. It likely would have ended up on one of those platforms though. Sometimes during development in those days, you work on a different board, then move it over to the target production hardware at some point. I also do wonder if it had notes needing to be hit like a BEMANI/modern rhythm game does, that might have worked better.

It appears that the working ROMs haven’t been made public yet, but I’m sure that they will be made available here soon. What do you think, should Atari have given JAMMIN’ a chance, maybe some extra refinement (or a drum set for controllers instead of buttons)?

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