Jack Nicklaus 4

Jack Nicklaus 4 is a 1997 sports golf video game. It was published by Accolade. The original Microsoft Windows version was developed by Santa Cruz, California-based Cinematronics and the Apple Macintosh version was developed by Austin, Texas-based Eclipse Entertainment.

The game includes four courses designed by Jack Nicklaus: Muirfield Village Golf Club, Colleton River Plantation, Country Club of the South and Cabo del Sol. It also includes one course created especially for the game. In addition to the course layout, weather is also a factor in play.

Play is similar to the previous games in the series, but the graphic quality and realism are greatly enhanced. For example, water hazards no longer look like "blue tar pits", but instead reflect the surrounding environment realistically.

The same course editor used by the developers comes with the game. It can be used to create new courses and modify the included ones. Courses from the previous Jack Nicklaus Signature Edition game can be loaded into the editor, as can user-designed ones from the older game. As with the previous games in the series, user-created courses abound on the Internet.

Before contracting with Cinematronics (not to be confused with the arcade game developer also named Cinematronics) to develop the game, early development of Jack Nicklaus 4 floated aimlessly around Accolade for years. Accolade had fairly good success with its Jack Nicklaus line of golf games (which itself followed Accolade's popular Mean 18 series of games), but hadn't released a game in the line since 1990. Instead of upgrading its existing game's code base, Accolade decided to start development anew. Their previous games were all DOS-based, and Accolade wanted their next Jack Nicklaus game to run on the emergingly popular Windows 3.1 operating system.

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