Atari Jaguar

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The Atari Jaugar was, is and shall be the pinnacle of console design, unless you include Playstation, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation 2, N64, Gamecube, XBOX, Super Nintendo and perhaps even the NES in the equation

The year was 1991, and times were a-changing in the world of video gaming. Gamers were thouroughly bored with the massive assortment of exciting, quality games offered on Sega's Genesis and Nintendo's Super Famicom Nintendo Home Entertainment System, and 80's home console behemoth Atari smelled digital gold from the depths of the digital sewer they had fallen into. Digitally. And Atari came to thee and said "LOL Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft and smite them all to hell!!!"

For those without comedic tastes, the so-called experts at Wikipedia have an article about Atari Jaguar.

[edit] Years and Years of Intensive Development

Atari wasted no time in hiring some guys they suspected could design a revolutionary game system. These men, who wore glasses, white lab coats and carried clipboards, hit the proverbial drawing board with the sole purpose of creating the most powerful console system since the Atari 2600.

Unsurprisingly, they came up with the very same revolutionary game system they had been charged to make. The hardware developers wowed Atari's board of directors with a demo until a brash young executive noted the game being displayed was, in fact, E-T: The Extra Terrestrial, and that the new game system was simply a 2600 with the "2600" crossed out and "new game system" scribbled over it in Sharpie.

Atari wasted no time in firing the men they had hired and hired a new batch, and these men came up with something they called the Atari Three-Toed Sloth, which boasted dual tri core 64-bit processors. Atari's board loved the new design even more than the refurbished 2600 they had seen months ago, but insisted the console was given "an already well-known automotive" name. After much debate, Jaguar edged out Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Yugo, and Edsel.

[edit] Atari Shoots its Wad

The Deluxe Jaguar Package, which included an Epson dot matrix printer and was listed at only $750 USD, as compared ot the core system, which listed at $600 USD and did not come with an Epson dot matrix printer

Jaguar was released in the US in 1992 to much fanfare, some trumpetfare and a good amount of bus fare. However, Atari blundered badly with its initial lineup of games, which featured no games designed for the Jaguar. Atari, perhaps banking on the fact that Jaguar was backwards compatible with several 2600 titles, including Combat, Custer's Revenge and E-T: The Extra Terrestrial, was shocked.

Atari then splurged hundreds of dollars on third-party developers to get games rushed to the market as the super-powerful but unsupported Jaguar lay mouldering on shelves. The results were at best mixed, as there was scant interest in games for a system no one owned. The shameful US Jaguar roll-out became the enduring model in the industry of how not to have a console roll out, though the Japanese ignored this message and proceeded to grace the gaming world with Virtual Boy, Sega CD, Sega 32X, and 3DO.

Ironically (in the sense that the end of the last sentence is about Japan), the disaster of the slow US release was compounded by the debacle that was the Japanese release. In Japan, Jaguar was mistranslated and sold as The Atari Underage She-male. Sales were initially strong until Japanese consumers realized there was no hot underage she-male action on Jaguar. And, despite Atari getting Hot, Underage She-male Adventures to market in Japan in 1993 (A repackaged and renamed E-T: The Extra Terrestrial that was dressed in girl's clothings for most of its adventures), the system sold less copies than even the XBOX would a decade later, dooming Jaguar overseas. Eventually the Sony Playstation came out and the Japanese turned their attention to it, as it cost less and had better graphics and a built in CD drive. Atari countered that it didn't play 15 year old Atari 2600 games, nor did it have a 300 baud modem, tape drive, or dot matrix printer as the Atari Jaguar has. Turns out nobody cares about those things anymore.

[edit] Laid to Rest

In 1995, Jaguar had lost Atari a whole bunch of monies, even though dozens of systems and hundreds, if not a thousand, games had been sold worldwide. Atari, facing insolvency, pulled the plug on the system in 1996, and buried all remaining Jaguars in the same pit millions of copies of E-T: The Extra Terrestrial were dumped in.

[edit] Why, God, Why?!?

Ultimately, it was the lack of games that critics pointed out as dooming Jaguar, not the poor system design, utterly retarded controllers, and lack of processing and graphics power.

[edit] The Hardware

Science has pondered long and hard over what made the Jaguar so dern powerful. Was it Jesus? Or was it 64 bits of raw, musky power lurking under its hot plastic hood? Let's take a closer look:

TECH SPECS FOR THE ATARI THREE-TOED SLOTH (AKA JAGUAR)

• CPU: Two (dual) tri core 64 Bit processors. 64 + 64 = er, huh? (Do the math ._.)
• RAM: 2MB (2,048 kilobytes)
• CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo) (16,384 millibits) (did not actually play CDs until CD Player upgrade)
• Storage Medium: High capacity "cartridge" format capable of storing upwards of 6 megabytes (6,144 kilobytes)
• Atari 2600: Miniaturized on a single chip. 8 Bit 6507 CPU, 8 color graphics, 2 channel sound.
• Amiga 500: Leftover Amiga 500 parts, 7.16Mhz 68000 CPU for management issues, Fat Agnus renamed Tom, screen flicker problem from Hell.

[edit] See Also

• Nintendo
• Atari
• dog
• cat
• AAAAAAAAA!