My Atari Jaguar Story
The Jaguar was an absolute disaster as far as Atari was concerned. It was so bad that it spelled the end of the company as far as console competition was concerned and it was only after more than a decade of arrogance that the company finally folded. There was a string of very bad decisions made that all began back when the basically controlled the home console market and didn't really have any real competitors in the industry - Competitors existed, it was just that Atari already had a stranglehold on the industry and the "other guys" didn't stand a chance.
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When the Jaguar was announced it appeared as though perhaps Atari had finally gotten their shit together and this was going to be a bombastic system the likes of which the world had never seen before. The hype was huge going into it and there was a ton of demand. Unfortunately Atari couldn't even get this right and on release date there were massive shortages all over the country including where I lived. The only reason why I didn't get one on release date is because even though our community was small (only around 40,000 population) there were a mere 10 consoles sent to our local Wal-Mart. 10!
This was just another horrible mistake on Atari's part and we should have expected it from their terrible management. By the time the shelves were stocked with Jaguars, word had already spread that the console was a dud and now no one even wanted one. This resulted in developers not being interested in making games for the console and then the self-perpetuating circle of demise had began.
The Internet wasn't really a thing in 1993 even though yes, it did exist. It was slow, expensive, unreliable, and very few people even had it - which I know is something that is difficult to imagine these days but it was the case. I don't know anyone that used the internet in 1993 and because of my nerd-like status, I would have if anyone was using it. I think my high school had a computer that was connected to the internet but I'm guessing there weren't many pictures of naked ladies on there yet so there wasn't much demand.
The word about the Atari Jaguar got being a garbage system got out by word of mouth and for us, it was the word from the mouth of one of our friends who was "lucky" enough to be one of the 10 people in our community that was able to get his hands on the console on release date. He went home, stoked as hell to be one of the lucky few that got one of these gems and plugged in his Cybermorph game that came with the system.
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This game was meant to be some sort of answer to the wildly popular StarFox games on Nintendo but with what was touted as a vastly superior machine.
To call this game a piece of crap does a disservice to pieces of actual crap.
The graphics were decent, but certainly not something that one would expect from a machine that was meant to be light-years beyond what currently existed in the SNES and Genesis, plus the graphics in the distance didn't even load very far from where you currently happened to be, so navigating anywhere was a an exercise in futility.
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The graphics looked "boxy" and while I suppose it did look better than Star Fox, it wasn't fun either and this was in stark contrast to Star Fox, which was actually a really great game.
The next problem my friend who got the system found was that the other games that were available at launch were also shipped in massively low levels. It was almost impossible to get your hands on any of the other games that were released at launch. The same places there were out of Jaguar consoles, were also out of every single game that was "available."
I don't know if Atari was attempting to create intentional scarcity in order to drive the hype, but what actually happened was the opposite affect. Gamer nerds actually DID know someone who got their hands on the machine and went over to their place to celebrate the fact that they got one and then were immediately completely unimpressed. So if Atari did this on purpose they really shot themselves in the foot.
Myself, and all of my other friends would have purchased one of these machines on release date based on the hype alone and I am sure the sentiment was the same nation-wide. However, we were not able to get one and by the the time Atari finally stocked the shelves, we were already convinced that this machine was a turd and we were not going to shell out $200 or whatever it cost to get one.
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Now let's have a look at this controller - what a nightmare! This is quite possibly the worst controller ever made for any system and while the massive amount of buttons might have been useful if any games ever had been developed that used it (there actually were some that did use it, but very few) it might have been necessary, but instead it just made this absolutely monstrous controller almost painful to hold.
Why they didn't just make a 6 button controller the likes of which Nintendo and Sega had already developed and instead went for this design is a mystery that only contributed to the demise of the system and Atari in general.
The biggest factor in the failure of the system is that Atari failed to attract may 3rd party developers including Capcom, who was all the rage at the time and is still a power player to this day. Behind the scenes there were two reasons why this happened: One, the Jaguar was apparently a very difficult system to design games for and Two, Atari's arrogance at the top management level encouraged many would-be developers to walk away.
While not the biggest game console disaster of all time (that likely belongs to 3DO) the Jaguar is right up there in the top 5 probably. While game consoles generally need to sell many millions of units in order to survive and sell additional games, the Jaguar managed to sell a mere 100,000 in the first year due in part to the fact that they failed to get them on the shelves on release date. They would only sell a grand total of 250,000 units overall. To put this into perspective about exactly how much of an extreme fail this is both the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo sold over 30 million consoles and were released years before this turd. The PS2, which remains the best-selling system of all time, sold 155 million units.