It’s no secret that the Atari Jaguar was a terrible failure–one of gaming’s worst. The last dud in the sordid history of Atari’s Tramiel family ownership, the Jaguar followed the Lynx’s underrated hardware debut in the late 1980s with an early ’90s abomination of poorly designed hardware and software.But why bring up that now?
From Fatherly: "The Atari Jaguar never stood a chance. Here's why this forgotten video game system could have been the next big thing, but wasn't."
the jaguar (as a system) was pretty interesting. it certainly had the chops to go toe to toe with the others at the time. The problem was the lack of understanding the architecture. Only very few titles could actually show off some of what the Jag was capable of (ex. AvP) but many devs chose not to get to know the hardware and instead used what they knew which was the 68k processor inside (even though there were more powerful chips at their disposal).
It didnt help things that the controller was atrocious to deal with. Using overlays like it was the good old days... not very user friendly. They tried to correct that by making a pro controller with more face buttons but hardly any games made use of it. And the CD attachment that made the whole thing look like a kiddie potty... yikes. the only saving grace now is the indie / modding community. there have been much better games released for it recently than back in the day.
“Hopelessly Failed Kids Everywhere”
At the time, the Jaguar was not marketed as a kids console. Just look at the games: Doom, Aliens versus Predator, and Wolfenstein 3D. This was basically a PC gaming alternative for grownups. Made sense when the Nintendo and Sega owned the market for kids games. Except of course that grownups already had PCs that played PC games. Keep in mind that back then, graphics ran on the CPU. Gaming PC prices were net yet inflated by the cost of dedicated graphics cards.
The article was probably AI generated. If not then the website might as well get AI to write this stuff.
A dud console with a stupidly designed controller, and only a small smattering of worthwhile games, with no Japanese support, using carts when the industry was moving to optical media (except Nintendo of course!), never had the chance to be the next big thing in gaming.
It didn’t fail kids everywhere hardly anyone bought it. One of the few consoles I’ve passed on. Xb1 Xbox series and Jaguar are the only bigger consoles I’ve never owned.
Cultured Vultures: Atari's last true console didn't have many big hitters but we managed to find ten of the best Atari Jaguar games worth putting up with the controller for.
Telling Atari's story with every Atari console ranked from worst to best will show you just how much the company achieved — and ultimately failed at.
The lynx was a cool system. I did enjoy hydra, apb and warbirds on it. Lots of good arcade ports.
APB was a really good port, after seeing this article I just ordered Gauntlet off ebay
Way ahead of its time and definitely not utilized to its full potential.
There's an MK1 port by homebrew crowd that absolutely mops the floor with the Game Gear /genesis versions
Still have my Atari Lynx, Chips Challenge, Xenophobe, Rampage and Paper Boy still get regular playtime on it.
Worst (for me) is the 5200. That controller alone just kills any positive the system had. I grew up with the 2600 so it is very near and dear to me but I would say my favorite is the 7800 due to it also supporting 2600 carts.
The jag was very under utilized. Their decision to mix and match components made it even more troublesome to develop for than the saturn. In the right hands... it could do some impressive stuff. Sadly it didn't last long enough (commercially) to see the fruits of that labor. And Atari didnt exactly provide the best support for programming.
Maybe the handheld. Everything else made by Atari was outclassed by the competition.
Loved the 2600 and the memories it brings back. The hours playing Asteroids and missle command on rainy days.
And yet I still want one after all these years.
Best Jaguar game - Alien vs Predator
Worst Jaguar game - kasumi ninja (lol) hahahahaha
I lol'ed every time it got mentioned. xD
Bad controller that had stupid numbers on it. Also, it was expensive. The thing was hard to program for as well, true if you added up all the processors it was 64 bit, but at the time developers didn't know how to take advantage of it.
They had a flying game that looked a lot like Starfox, but Starfox looked and played better on the Super Nintendo.
I want a new Atari console