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This is the Atari
Jaguar section. I have a small selection of Atari Jaguar Games, as well as Atari Jaguar Consoles. Click any of these links to take you to the appropriate
section.
The Atari Jaguar is was
introduced in November 1993 as a powerful next generation platform. It was
infamously touted as the "first 64-bit system". Competing with Sega and
Nintendo's 16-bit consoles, the Jaguar was said to be 64-bit. Back then, "bitness"
was an important marketing factor in the gaming industry, just as
polygon-pushing power is today. The Jaguar did not work off of a solitary 64-bit
processor, but instead had a collection of processors with bus widths ranging
from 16 to 64 bits. The bit classification of the Jaguar is still a source of
considerable debate today. Consensus exists among those who are familiar with
the system hardware that, because Jaguar's main data bus and some of the
processors are 64-bit, the entire system can be considered 64 bit. It would
otherwise be considered a 32-bit console.
Nonetheless, it was technically superior to the leading 16-bit consoles at the
time. Unfortunately, this last ditch effort by Atari to find room in the console
market failed. A relatively small number of games were developed for the system,
but Atari pulled the plug altogether in 1996. The Jaguar was a minor cult
success. Jaguar conventions are held to show off rare unfinished Jaguar games
that never made it to the shelves. A development company named Songbird
Productions still produces games available for sale on the commercial market.
The Jaguar and the Lynx were the last two Atari systems to be developed, but
because the company did not want any direct involvement in hardware production,
they were produced by outside contractors. In 1990, Flare Technology, a company
formed by Martin Brennan and John Mathieson with Atari funding, said that not
only could they make a console far superior to the Sega Genesis or the SNES, but
they could also be cost-effective. Atari immediately agreed and the system was
released in November 1993 for a sale price of $249.99, under a $500 million
manufacturing deal with IBM. The system was initially marketed only in the New
York City and the San Francisco Bay areas. A nationwide release followed in
early 1994.
The system was marketed under the slogan "Do the Math" (i.e. 32 bit + 32 bit =
64 bit), claiming superiority over competing 16-bit systems. Initially, the
system sold well, substantially outselling the highly hyped and publicized 3DO,
which was also released during the holiday season of 1993. However, the system
was eventually considered a failure, due to a perception of the Jaguar having
poor games and an overall lack of software developed. The system was difficult
to program for as the hardware had a large number of bugs, including one in the
memory controller that stopped some of its processors executing code from the
system RAM.
The final nail in the coffin was the release of both the Sony PlayStation in
Fall 1995 and the Sega Saturn earlier in the summer. In an interview, Sam
Tramiel, CEO of Atari, also touted that the Jaguar was much more powerful than
the Saturn and slightly weaker than the PlayStation. He also predicted the price
of the PlayStation to be $500 and said that any price from $250 to $300 would be
dumping and that Atari would sue to block sales (they never did). The baseless
comments were selected as #3 in the Top 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming.
In a last ditch effort to rescue the Jaguar, Atari tried to play down these two
consoles by claiming the Jaguar was the only 64-bit system, causing some
controversy. (Some contended that the Jaguar's two 64-bit "processors" were
essentially nothing more than graphics accelerators; its GPU was only 32-bit and
its CPU was a 16-bit 68000.) This advertising push was futile, and production of
the Jaguar stopped after Atari purchased JT Storage in a reverse takeover.
Several peripherals were announced, such as a voice modem and VR headset, but
the only peripherals released were the Atari Jaguar CD drive and the JagLink, a
simple two-console networking device. Working prototypes of some of the proposed
future developments exist (some, such as the Jaguar Voice Modem, in relatively
large quantities), and include fully-functional versions of the VR headset, with
infrared head-tracking, and a stereo adaptor to allow connection of the Jaguar
to a hi-fi system. See Loki and Konix Multisystem for early development.
After Atari was bought out by Hasbro Interactive in the late 1990s, Hasbro
released the encryption coding to the Jaguar, finally opening the doors for
enthusiasts and hobby programmers to make their own Jaguar games and software,
similar to what has happened with another defunct game system, the Sega
Dreamcast. Several game companies, including Telegames and Songbird Productions,
have not only released previously unfinished materials from the Jaguar's past,
but also several brand new titles to satisfy the system's cult following.
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