6/17/2023 0 Comments Bust a move 4 nuon![]() ![]() They had a nerdy guy in a lab coat holding with a shiny briefcase pose for pictures with some security people and to the delight of the Atarians out there some of the first games were unveiled which all had ties to Jaguar software – Tempest 3000 and the Virtual Light Machine 2 were in development by the legendary Jeff Minter, Iron Solider 3 was being done by Eclipse. Granted, game magazines at the time still had their weight and they would provide more details to us, which I will get into in a moment. Keep in mind that for most of us, this was the first time we received news of new video game consoles from the hyper-fast internet delivery service as opposed to waiting for a magazine to arrive in the mail. They did a great job with that initial hype phase and us Atari fanboys lapped it up like cold water on a hot summer day. It was at E3 1998 when some of those questions were answered when a company called VM Labs made their first push to tease Project X to the game world. Could this Project X be the Jaguar 3 perhaps? For Jaguar fanboys it could be a dream come true as among the unreleased projects that the Jaguar produced was the Jaguar 2. They were working on a mysterious new console called Project X, which had been in development since 1996. In this environment came news about a new game console that was in the works by some of the people who were involved with the Jaguar’s development in the first place. There were a huge number of games the console never got but were being worked on so it was an exciting time if you cared about that particular console – all 300~ of us. Around 1997-99, the Jaguar was living a second life thanks to the efforts of companies like called Telegames and Songbird Productions who were taking unreleased Jaguar games and giving them a full commercial release. They were more like scrapbooks with little artistic direction.Īround this time I became involved in various Atari message boards like Jaguar Interactive II(nothing there to see now and I can’t find an archive). The webpages back then really didn’t look like much. For those that didn’t want to use IE, there were Netscape Browsers. Then Windows 98 came along with Internet Explorer dial-up modems were starting to reach 56k and if you were lucky you knew someone that had an ISDN or DSL connection. ![]() I could find little else to use those other OS’s for. It hadn’t been long before this that most teenagers like myself were accustomed to using computers using the text-based DOS we tried out GUI OS’s like Windows 3.1 and 95 but if you wanted to play the cool games, DOS was where it was at. It would end up creating a market bubble, which when that burst had the standard economic fallout of various companies going under. It is when the general public started to really jump into the internet thanks to HTML, web browsers, JAVA and so on. The late 90s was a pretty amazing time as far as technology goes. So I am going to take the opportunity with this blog to go back through my NUON experience, starting around 1998 up until 2001. ![]() With so much information floating around out there on a daily basis, just as much is forgotten as is learned. The internet itself is a much different place now compared to 14 years ago, the amount of information has increased drastically as have the capabilities of what can be done online. By the time I got back in 2003, there wasn’t any reason to restart the site so I moved onto other things. I put Castle NUON on an intended hiatus back in 2001 because I left to do religious missionary work in Brazil as an energetic 19 year old but a short time after I left, the whole NUON gig fell apart and disappeared into the memory hole. In retrospect it might seem a little silly to get so worked up about something that ultimately failed but it was a fun ride and it gave me some experience with HTML coding, tracking down news stories, tracking down developers for interviews and more that I have used in my work for sites like Arcade Heroes. Called Castle NUON, myself and two or three other guys online took it upon ourselves to promote a product we had no personal financial stake in – we weren’t investors in any of the companies involved, we just loved video games, especially from underdogs. I ran a blog (before they were called such good ol’ Geocities!) about all things NUON, reporting on news and other tidbits in regards to the technology. I recall it pretty well as I was a NUON ‘Fanboy’ for a few years. Remember NUON DVD players that could play a few games? No? Maybe?
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