Tom Zuber’s Concept Art
I found an art blog for one of the artists who worked on the console versions of “Nicktoons: Battle for Volcano Island”—specifically Tom Zuber who was credited as a (senior) lead artist. The art blog, along with concept arts for many of the other games Zuber has worked on, also has concept art for “Battle for Volcano Island” that was not viewable in the game at Squidward’s Art Gallery.
Some of the concept art shared on the blog was made available at Squidward’s Art Gallery, specifically this, this and this. As for the concept art that wasn’t, we have four different ones. The names assigned to the art comes from their image file name.
Interestingly, Zuber refers to the game as “SpongeBob Escape from Volcano Island”, and I am left to wonder if it’s just the name of the game remembered wrong or if that were the original working title—or maybe even both of those options.
Rockface Path
This exact area doesn’t exist in the game, but there are some areas which do have carved out faces on the stone walls. I can imagine that this concept area could have been used as a penultimate one, where the Chosen Ones are going up the volcano in order to face the Mawgu.
Insect People
This is clearly concept art for some member of the insect people in the game, known as the Myrmec, which we didn’t get to see a lot of in game. Perhaps this is meant to be a generic member of that species. They could have also been meant as a more prominent figure given the staff that they hold.
Monkey
Two of these landscape features do exist in game—just not in this specific arrangement. The monkey Statue of Liberty is in the hub area, while I want to say that the boat mostly exists in cutscenes. I don’t think there is a giant shell in the game, but tinier versions of it do exist and in fact are interacted with in order to return to previous levels.
Inside Volcano
Now this is really peculiar concept art; it certainly doesn’t look like it is for this game. My first thought was that it was instead concept art for “Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots”, as Zuber was an external artist for that game, but it is specifically called concept art for “SpongeBob Escape from Volcano Island” and the image itself is called inside_volcano.jpg, so it has to be for “Battle for Volcano Island”. While you do traverse through a volcano in the game, the goo within is purple, and there isn’t anything industrial like what we see here. There is another area of the game with more mechanical elements, though—just not to this degree.
This does make me curious if this concept art inspired the Mawgu Lair that we see in “SpongeBob SquarePants featuring Nicktoons: Globs of Doom”, which has a technological look to it...
Also, strangely enough, the Nintendo DS “Battle for Volcano Island” does mention green goo in its story through its text, specifically saying that they need to collect it so Jimmy can make his Rip-Zipper device. It never really impacts the actual gameplay, though—you are just told of the green goo, how it is needed and how the heroes are gathering it along the way exclusively in the cutscenes through the dialogue alone. The only exception is during the second phase of the final boss, where you are meant to be knocking green goo out of the Mawgu, and you can see green particular effects leave him as you hit him.
Maybe it’s possible that the folks who worked on the Nintendo DS version (that is, the developers from Natsume Atari) could have taken inspiration from this concept art? I can’t say that I know how involved the different teams are when it comes to developing licensed games for multiple systems, but there has to be some amount of coordination given the different versions have... a similar enough story within a similar enough environment with the same final boss.
Newpage
We have ourselves some concept art that I think is actually for “Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots” instead of “Battle for Volcano Island” given the UFOs. This area—which is Danny’s hometown Amity Park—does exist in “Attack of the Toybots” as one of the mech levels, so that does track at least.