Sphere Warriors (aka BattleSphere)

Welcome to a micropage covering the time when Viridis straight-up stole two game concepts from 4Play, the developers of Atari Jaguar title BattleSphere!
Yes, this actually happened!

Info Table

The Drama

The entirety of what's known about Sphere Warriors comes from a September 19th, 1998 Usenet post written by Scott Le Grand, one of the creators of (the actual) BattleSphere.

The development of BattleSphere for the Atari Jaguar was a six-year process lasting from 1994 to 2000. Around late 1996, Scott Le Grand was planning to register the battlesphere.com domain for his company's in-development title, but found out that another company had beat them to it. This company was Viridis, known primarily for developing Zelda's Adventure. Upon visiting their website, viridis.com, Scott discovered that Viridis were also working on a networking space battle game called BattleSphere. It was *ahem* very heavily inspired by 4Play's preview of their BattleSphere at the 1994 Summer CES, including its graphics, concept, game description, and title screen.

It gets worse, somehow. Viridis' headquarters were only a few blocks away from the west Los Angeles apartment that Scott was living in at the time, so they were likely aware of 4Play's existence. Furthermore, Viridis' website mentioned a second game called "Killing Spree", whose premise was very similar to "Goin' Postal", a joke concept that Scott mentioned in an early 1996 interview with Intelligent Gamer's Fusion. Viridis were planning to showcase this alongside their other "original" games at E3 1997. And, to top it all off, Viridis were making their BattleSphere for the PC when 4Play were unable to get funding to make a PC port of the original BattleSphere!

This couldn't stand. Another employee of 4Play (Tom Harker) called up Viridis and had a conversation with their lawyer. This resulted in the game being renamed to Sphere Warriors... though the game's setting was still referred to as the BattleSphere! Furthermore, their website still had the original pagesfor their BattleSphere ripoff hidden away, which Scott downloaded in case they could be useful in the near-future. This never happened, as Viridis closed soon after they renamed Sphere Warriors. According to this article about another Viridis title, they were bought out or sold to a publisher named Crossroads and stopped operating soon after. Viridis' ghost still held onto the battlesphere URL for some time, but 4Play were able to get it back by 2000 in time for Battlesphere's release.

Ultimately, it's unknown why Viridis decided to rip off 4Play this badly. Were they trying to take the name and its concept after 4Play vanished for a brief period in 1996? Were Viridis somehow involved in the early pitches of the game? We may never know.