After two years of work the game was roughly 80% done. The game engine was nearing "first playable" state and was very slick (considering the platform), allowing for seamless, delay free travel through the city on foot or by cab, and injection into cyberspace. All game video had been shot and processed, with just a few special effects shots to finish. All the sprites were shot, processed and in the game.
There were negotiations to have Nine Inch Nails do the soundtrack, with a strong interest from Trent Reznor himself. But Atari was cheap and tried to drive the price insultingly low and the deal fell apart.
The movie company which shot the game video footage was interested in a motion picture adaptation of Black ICE\White Noise but Atari demanded insane amounts of money for the movie rights and negotiations died quickly.
Some game documentation and the latest build of the code were saved but Atari destroyed the rest.
(Email interview with B.J. West, 1999)

CR: How about Black ICE\White Noise?
FT: Well, that was meant to be kind of the big Atari internally-produced big, big-effort game that was going to put Atari back on the map. It basically started from Sam Tramiel, the president of Atari mandating that we create our own Sonic, Mario, iconic character and basically what happened was we went through many iterations of these kind of really lame mascot-characters, from ducks to alligators to armadillos to… it was all very ridiculous. I don’t think anybody was ever terribly enthused by all these pre-mascot-things so we wanted to do something a little bit edgier. So we came up with the concept Black ICE\White Noise which was, you know, a very innovative concept at the time, in many aspects it was like The Matrix before that ever came out. It more or less embodied that Cyberpunk-hacker archetype that Keanu Reeves played in the movie, we had another guy whose name was Chris Hudak, a video game journalist, he writes for like Next Generation and Wired. So basically we had created this whole world which involved hacking and infiltration and going into cyberspace, very much like The Matrix. It’s probably scary how similar the two actually are, it was all based on William Gibson’s Cyberpunk. We had done a lot of film production on that in terms of shooting people on blue screen and treadmills and basically it was a game that incorporated driving, fighting, exploration and all kinds of things like that into one big package. It was a third person game, one of the things we didn’t want to make was a first person shooter because we want the character to come out and the best way to do that was third person. So basically it was going to be a third person game before third person games were big like Tomb Raider and still embodied a lot of those types of elements in the game. So you would be able to walk down the city street and if you wanted to hijack a car you could get in that car and start driving through the city and maybe the cops would chase you. Or if you needed to hack into some place you could hack into something and you would be in cyberspace. So it was… obviously… probably… way too ambitious for the limited resources that we had but it was very good to give it a try, it had a lot of cutting-edge techniques in terms of integrating 3D and video and digitized graphics into a game. And in theory it would have come out pretty well. It was a very big project for Atari at the time.
CR: I assume it was CD-based? And what happened to it?
FT: Yeah, CD-based. I think basically towards the end, I don’t really have a time line there, but there was a certain point in time when things were just kind of spiraling downhill, you know, a lot of cost cutting, layoffs and this desperate attempt to really get into the PC market which never really took off or happened, you know, the bulk of the projects, all really cool stuff that I was working on, most of those fell by the wayside, it was pretty unfortunate. Some of the easier projects like Bubsy and NBA Jam, those things actually came out OK but the more ambitious projects were just dropped.
CR: Bummer! The screenshots I’ve seen of Black ICE\White Noise looked very good.
FT: Yeah, you know, hindsight is 20:20 but when you look at some of the stuff it was… a lot of the concepts that we had thought of are now the concepts of today. So, yeah, in many ways we were really ahead of our times but, you know, didn’t really do us any good. But it was fun! A lot of fun to fly down, do the video shoots, and just kind of learning that whole process of integrating digital video into computer games, it was very educational, so, you know, from a learning experience standpoint and from a fun standpoint I really have very few regrets if any. There were a lot of difficulties, you know, but the knowledge and the experience was great.
CR: Where was Black ICE\White Noise shot?
FT: Basically we went down to Los Angeles and just rented a studio and just kind of cranked out all of the preset motion patterns that we needed. Like walking forward, walking backward, left, right, up, down, climb, duck, shoot, punch, kick and just plowed through it on treadmills and blue screens.
CR: So similar to the Mindripper project?
FT: Well, we would shoot against a blue screen and then we would cut out those patterns and make our sprites based on those actions. So basically it was like Mortal Kombat, kind of the same thing except we went for more of a 3D feel, so clearly we had to shoot all of the rotations, so that it appeared that you existed in this 3D world. Chris Hudak was kind of the star of the whole thing and we actually hired Michiko Nishiwaki (female martial arts artist from Hong Kong, recently played in 'Man On The Moon'). Ironically a lot of these things are interconnected, the people that put us in contact with the Mindripper people were also some of the people that shot the video for Black ICE\White Noise and they had a contact with… actually what we did was in many ways a very open casting call because a lot of these things were… not only was there basic motions and combat and running and walking but a lot of it was actual video so the character could come up to somebody and you could have a conversation and you could play that conversation and respond positive, negative or neutral. And based on that you’d get different responses and the person would actually respond so we needed actors and some of them… we never got anybody huge but we got kind of a cult martial artist from Hong Kong that had been in a few big martial arts movies out in Hong Kong and she was basically just trying to break into the US market, thought it would be fun, you know. It was a neat process to have the auditions and get a, you know, not really big name but semi-big name at least to a few hard-core martial art film fans, you know. Like I said before, the experience was great and I got really good broad insight into producing a huge expensive product that involved a lot of different elements.
(CyberRoach Magazine #9, 2/2000 - Interview with Faran Thomason)

Related links:
http://www.cyberroach.com/cyromag/nine/default.htm
http://www.strafe.com/guide/writing/Atari.html
http://www.strafe.com/guide/writing/Atari2.html
http://www.strafe.com/bj/