After Atari dropped support for the Jaguar, a programmer named Carl Forhan revived the project by reaching out to Bech on a Usenet forum and licensing the game from Bethesda.

Hasbro Interactive later made the Jaguar an open platform, allowing Forhan to finish and publish the game under his studio Songbird Productions.

Protector and the special edition earned critical acclaim; Praise was given to the audiovisual presentation, controls, and gameplay, but some were divided regarding the difficulty curve.

[1][7] Enemies sometimes drop red orbs, which the player can spend at a shop between levels, allowing them to purchase items such as shields, bombs, extra lives, and rapid fire.

[13][14] The game was designed by Danish developer Jørgen Bech, who worked on Globulus for the Amiga, Spider-Man for the Master System, and several other titles for the ZX Spectrum.

[9] Bech had left the video game industry after his negative experience working at Innerprise Software, but took a job at Bethesda after an acquaintance connected him with the company.

The hyperspace jump effect was created with Alias PowerAnimator on an SGI workstation, and pre-rendered sprites were made by Bech using 3D Studio.

[15][16] Now titled Protector, the game was fully playable by March 1995, but Atari did not want to publish it due to perceived competition with Defender 2000.

[20] Years later, a programmer named Carl Forhan began searching for unreleased Jaguar games that he might license and finish on his own.

Forham initially obtained the rights to view the source code for educational use only, but eventually managed to secure a license to publish the game.

[9][17][24] The following year, Forhan founded Songbird Productions to complete Protector and other unreleased games he had licensed from former Atari developers.

[20][21][25] That same year, Atari fans successfully lobbied Hasbro Interactive to release the console's patents and rights into the public domain, transforming the Jaguar into an open game development platform.

[7][30][31] Forhan decided to improve the game based on feedback from the Jaguar fandom, leading to the announcement of Protector: Special Edition at JagFest 2K1.

[8] PCMag considered it the definitive version of Protector, while Time Extension deemed it better than the original release due to its new features and content.