In 1992 Atari was an almost non-existent in the world of video games. There last console the Atari 7800 was destroyed by Nintendo and to a lesser extent Sega. With there companies hardware division now in shambles and the company being kept afloat by its relatively small software division and there back money from Atari VCS/2600 days. With the days of the 16-bit era of video games coming to an end and little competition in sight for the 32/64-bit world of games it seemed that Atari had a golden opportunity to capture this market and become the dominate console manufacture yet again, and so the idea of the Atari Jaguar was born.
Atari began work on there new console as soon as they could starting two new development projects entitled “Panther” (a console centered around 32-bit technology) and “Jaguar” (a console centered around 64-bit technology). Development of Jaguar progressed faster then Panther prompting Atari to scrap the Panther project. With there new console ahead of schedule as far as development goes it seemed as though Atari was about to capitalize on an open market, but rough waters were ahead for Atari's new console.
In 1993 an upstart company called 3DO launched there 32-bit system a good year before Atari's scheduled launch of the Jaguar, but at a price point of $699.99 Atari didn't see 3DO as that big of a threat. There real threats were the console made by Nintendo and Sega which even though they were years away were already getting more press then the Jaguar. Knowing that time could be there greatest ally Atari started rushing to get the Jaguar out to market as soon as possible.
Once test markets of the Jaguar turned out to be successful Atari did a nation wide launch the console in November of 1994. The Jaguar came packaged with one controller and the game Cyber Morph (Cyber Morph was considered a good 3D game but was heavily criticized for its lack of polygonal textures). Jaguar suffered two big blow right out of the gate: one was that it had what will be considered one of the worst controllers in the history of video games and two its first Christmas sales where horrible mostly due to its lack of good games (one great irony is that Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM all came out that January rite after the Jaguars first Holiday season ended).
Atari new that the only way that they were going to be able to hold there own against Sega and Nintendo's new consoles (the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn respectively) was to sell as many consoles as possible anyway they could. With there first chance to sell a lot of consoles (Christmas) over Atari decided to drop the price of there console to $199.99 and start an ad campaign telling people to “Do the math” when comparing the Jaguars 64-bits to the other console manufactures 16 and 32. One problem about there ad campaign was that it was factually inaccurate, from a technical standpoint the Jaguar was a mix of 16, 32 and 64-bit technologies though its duel co-processors were 64-bit its main processor was 32-bit, its FM sound synthesizer was 16-bit and its circuit bored and leads were both 32-bit.
Over the course of 1995 Jaguar saw multiple price drops and the release of some truly horrible games (Checkered Flag, Kauai Ninja and Club Drive where some of the especially awful ones). Atari did have on last ditch effort left to save the Jaguar, the Jaguar-CD an expansion module that when combined with the Jaguar would allow it to play audio CDs and games on Jaguar-CDs (Atari developed its own special CDs that could hold 790 MB of data, the purpose of witch was to increase the size of the games that could be made for the console and dismay casual piracy). The Jaguar-CD launch in late 1995 and would come with a ton of bundled stuff (The games Blue Lightning and Vid Grid a demo for Myst and the audio soundtrack of Tempest 2000). The Jaguar-CD only sold 20,000 units and there were only 15 games ever made for it including its bundled games.
In the end the Jaguar was put to death by the Nintendo 64, Play Station and Sega Saturn. Not even its bestselling and arguably best game Alien vs. Predator could even make sales jump a little. Now we just write down the Jaguar as yet another failed console.
