Retro Gaming Australia

New footage has been released for the cancelled Atari Games (aka Midway) fighting game Primal Rage II. The video comes from a former Atari engineer who still had a working board and hard drive for the game in storage. The game’s hard drive has been backed up, and the engineer has elaborated that the board is essentially a modified PlayStation, which could lead to the game being emulated some time in the future.

Primal Rage II features human fighters rather than the dinosaurs and primates of the original. There’s a plot driven reason for this, in that a being named Necrosian imprisoned the gods in a state of suspended animation. In order to fight back, the gods gave themselves human forms. Apparently the humans would eventually be able to change into their dinosaur/primate form. The story for the game was eventually released in a novel entitled Primal Rage: The Avatars. Action figures for some of the Primal Rage II characters even made it to market.

In 1994, Sega Ozisoft released its stranglehold on the Australian market just a little, allowing other Australian companies the opportunity to produce cartridges and distribute games. Village Roadshow quickly jumped on the opportunity and struck deals with companies like Acclaim, Time Warner Interactive and Viacom New Media.

As a bit of a sweetener for those intending to purchase what Roadshow considered to be the big games of 1995 – Batman Forever, Primal Rage and Phantom 2040 – the company produced special edition box sets for the three games which sold for a little bit more than the standard retail price. These sets are exclusive to Australia, and therefore command a premium.

We snagged images of the last good condition box sets to sell online for the Australian Gaming Database, but we thought we’d take the opportunity to discuss them on the main site.

The amusing thing is that these sets were totally unpopular when they were first released, and wound up on clearance for as little as $15 by the end of the Mega Drive era, but the last completed sale for these sets saw them go for some $AU500+.

The big question is are these sets actually worth $500? (continue reading…)