Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Some years back, former Atari programmer/designer Gary Stark shared some internal documents online from his time at the company, including a host of documents relating to Guardians of the Hood. He's since deleted these documents from his website for undisclosed reasons, but they were caught by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
I wanted to go through these documents on stream because they tell a fascinating tale. Pit Fighter was a big hit for Atari in 1990, so it was a no-brainer to make Pit Fighter II. Somewhere along the way they decided to rebrand it (it took them a while to find the right title for the game too) and use all new characters for the game, leading to a lot of new stuff to digitize (which they claim to have gotten more efficient at). Also during that time, Street Fighter II came out, and it lead to Atari trying to figure out what they can do with the game to steal away players from SF2. Going by the initial focus test that they did with some teenagers, it didn't work. Given that Atari has scrapped a lot of prototypes, it still surprises me that they decided to go through with this game. (and what the hell were they going to do with an America's Most Wanted tie-in??)
Wayback Machine link - web.archive.org/web/20180914195744/http://www.cliffhouseproject.com/games/games.htm
Some years back, former Atari programmer/designer Gary Stark shared some internal documents online from his time at the company, including a host of documents relating to Guardians of the Hood. He's since deleted these documents from his website for undisclosed reasons, but they were caught by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
I wanted to go through these documents on stream because they tell a fascinating tale. Pit Fighter was a big hit for Atari in 1990, so it was a no-brainer to make Pit Fighter II. Somewhere along the way they decided to rebrand it (it took them a while to find the right title for the game too) and use all new characters for the game, leading to a lot of new stuff to digitize (which they claim to have gotten more efficient at). Also during that time, Street Fighter II came out, and it lead to Atari trying to figure out what they can do with the game to steal away players from SF2. Going by the initial focus test that they did with some teenagers, it didn't work. Given that Atari has scrapped a lot of prototypes, it still surprises me that they decided to go through with this game. (and what the hell were they going to do with an America's Most Wanted tie-in??)
Wayback Machine link - web.archive.org/web/20180914195744/http://www.cliffhouseproject.com/games/games.htm
