This is a partially finished build of the unreleased 4×4 Off-Roaders for the Game Boy Advance. The ROM is noticeably incomplete in spots, things that stand out is a missing HUD and occasional slowdown.
We are also releasing the ROM and source code to another canned game by Small Rockets – 2004’s Travis Pastrana’s Pro Moto X, based on the PS2 game by Activision.
4×4 Off-Roaders can be downloaded here, while Travis Pastrana’s Pro Moto X can be downloaded here.
[Note: 4×4 Off-Roaders only appears to work in BoycottAdvance, an emulator released around the time of the game’s development.]
Game Details
4×4 Off-Roaders was a racing game in development by the French studio Small Rockets around 2001. What’s interesting about this title was its use of a homemade voxel engine, giving the game a unique 3D setting.
The following information comes from Marcus Lynn, project lead and programmer of the game who was kind enough to send us the ROMs. Here’s his story about the game:
While at Small Rockets we wrote a number of cool games but in my spare time I would also write game engines/editors & game demos, a lot of videos of my tech/games can be found here on my YouTube channel.
One of the areas of tech that interested me was the Game Boy Advance, I didn’t have access to a dev kit at the time so used one of the many emulators around, which at that point in time were pretty buggy, so in my spare time began writing a voxel landscape engine, really just to see if I could get it to work on something without a GPU/FPU but just raw CPU power.
After a couple of months of working on this at home in the evenings/weekends I showed the demo to Jonathan and the company and we then progressed to create a game design (I’ve included the original game design doc too) along with some more tech for voxel objects. Once we had the demo up and running in the video (I’ve included the video as YouTube makes it very blurry) we posted it around to a few sites.
Within a few weeks (possibly even less) Nintendo contacted us and wanted to send us some official dev kits, which was brilliant, didn’t even have to convince them of anything, they just liked the tech and wanted to see something done with it on the Game Boy Advance.
From there we started working on 4×4 Off-Roaders, took it to a few different publishers and , as things often do in the games industry, the project morphed into something different, though we didn’t release 4×4 Off-Roaders in the end.
However we did get a contract to write Shaun Murray Wakeboarding on the GBA where I used some of the voxel object tech I created for 4×4 Off-Roaders, which did get released.
For more information about 4×4 Off-Roaders, check out the following links:
- smallrockets.com (archived)
- gamespot.com
- unseen64.net
Marcus also gave a brief word on Travis Pastrana’s Pro Moto X and its similar fate:
Soon after that I wrote another demo with the voxel object tech on the GBA for Travis Pastrana’s Pro Moto X (a video is also on the YouTube channel), but unfortunately this never saw the light of day, which was the same fate as the original voxel landscape engine I created to start with.
