Of all the ill-fated consoles of the 90's, the Jaguar was certainly one of the biggest disasters. While Atari correctly sensed the emergence of 3D graphics, the system was woefully underpowered in this regard. The Jaguar received little third-party support, and most of Atari's games were second-rate versions of arcade hits like Virtua Racing and Mortal Kombat. Although the Jaguar controller included a numeric keypad, it inexplicably had only three regular buttons. This despite the fact that the Super Nintendo had made six buttons the new standard the year before. The Jaguar never gained much of a market share, and by the time Atari released a CD attachment and six-button controller, the system had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Jaguar is Atari's claim that it was the first 64-bit console, as loudly proclaimed by their "do the math" marketing campaign. In the early 90's, the "bit" metric was mainly based on the CPU of the machine. Although certain components within the Jaguar could process 64 bits at a time, the CPU (central processing unit) was in fact 32-bit. This led to a major controversy, with many in the industry labeling Atari's marketing tactics as deceptive. The Jaguar's modest library of games did little to back up the 64-bit claim. Most of its 3D games were slow and clunky, and its 2D games, although sharp and colorful, often lacked the playability of similar titles for the Genesis or SNES. It's not easy to collect all the games for the Jaguar, but it's not too difficult to collect the best titles. Prices of games vary greatly, based on rarity and popularity. The base system is easy to acquire and relatively inexpensive. The CD attachment is somewhat rare, and its scant library of games makes it a questionable investment.