RETRO-spective: A 2022 look back at the Atari Jaguar

It is Christmas 1993. The Atari brand is a dumpster fire. The age of the 16 Bit games machine, dominated by Sega and Nintendo is coming to an end and Atari think that their 64-bit Jaguar is positioned to take over. In the age of the Bit Wars, where more bits MUST mean a console is BETTER, the 64-bit Jaguar, retailing at 250 US Dollars, is surely a guaranteed seller. Indeed, Atari had a lot of initial demand. Demand that they couldn’t match, meaning that most of the pre-orders had to be cancelled, and most people who pre-ordered a machine for Christmas, didn’t get one. This upset a lot of people who were willing to buy one, at a time when the Atari brand was mud.

It was probably at this point, 2 months after launch that Atari had messed up the slim chance, they had of being successful.

There is an awful lot to unpack about the Jaguar, a console that regularly features on “worst console of all time” lists. Huge mistakes were made with the Jaguar, there is no doubt but in 2022 the console, and its legacy feels misunderstood. A lot of problems were created by poor decisions by the Trammels (family of hardnosed businessmen who owned Atari at this point) but the game industry was about to become big business in a way that would run the old order out of town and leave the 5th generation of consoles as a peculiar footnote in gaming history. It was a weird estuary between the toys of the 16-bit generation and what came later. It was a time when Commodore, 3DO and Atari all savaged each other, when none of them really stood a chance against the might of Sony that was preparing to enter the market and change it forever. It was the three prison rioters trying to shank each other, as the SWAT team prepares to breach the doorway.

For one thing. The Jaguar looks great, and the controller, that many say is one of the worst of all time, feels just fine to me. The “silly phone buttons” are sensible to me (swapping weapons in Doom, without having to cycle through all your weapons, makes sense). The inclusion of only 3 face buttons was a mistake (that was corrected late in the consoles life, with the Pro Controller).

A common question (famously raised by Trip Hawkins, the founder of the rival 3DO company posed was “is the Jaguar actually 64 bits?” He said it wasn’t, as it was 2, 32-bit chips (which was true). The Jaguar had 2 chips (“Tom” and “Jerry” that were designed to control graphics and sound, respectively but the BUS on the console allowed for 64 bits to be used simultaneously. An aging Motorola 6800 chip (16 bit) was also included and was designed to only handle the controller inputs. This was the tried and tested chip that was in a Megadrive or a low-cost Amiga computer, and it was this chip that would perhaps define the Jaguar more than the 64 bits of power. Low initial sales, and the terrible business practices and reputation of the Trammels meant that of the many developers who signed up to make games on the Jaguar, only a small number ever did so. Furthermore, the low sales of the console put pressure on the few developers working on the console to push games out quickly, as returns would be low. This meant that many developers simply made versions of existing 16-bit games, using the Motorola 6800 chip, and basically not using Tom and Jerry. This meant that the fast ports could even be worse than their poor 16-bit equivalents (e.g. Double Dragon 5 is a rushed port on the Jaguar, of a bad game, and it had a full retail price for the cart). There wasn’t even complete or up to date developer documentation for the Jaguar, how can you expect developers to put out quality games when you do not take the time or effort to set them up for success? The Trammels were still living in the age when 1 person makes 1 game, every 3 Months. They do the coding, design, sound, music, and they do it all for a modest wage, and no bonus based on sales. This was the reason that Activision was founded, and with games like Final Fantasy 7 in development, the Trammels are sending Atari off to war not armed with a knife but a can opener. But perhaps, if they knew what they were up against, they wouldn’t be fighting at all. Even for the famously competitive Trammels there was no hope of beating Sony, no matter how many dirty tricks they pulled. The Trammels were a lot of things, but they were no fools. They were used to winning, and perhaps this made them even more entrenched in business practices that were at best, out of step with the changing times.

Atari themselves had boldly told us to “do the Math”. 64 bits is clearly better than 16. This could have been very powerful. The problem was, when people saw the games that were coming out on the Jaguar (crucially, only about 4 made it to the console in the first 6 months) none of them looked significantly better than 16 bits, and if you come into the market with such bluster, a lot of people are going to laugh very hard if you fail. Of the initial releases, Cybermorph was the pack in title, and the one that was the most likely to impress as a 64-bit demonstration of the future of games, but it had a terrible draw distance, due to the Jaguar’s struggles with rendering 3D. I think Cybermorph is a decent game, but was it really 4 times better than Star Fox on the Super Nintendo? People thought no (and they were right). Another launch title, Trevor McFur in the Cresent Galaxy is flat out bad.

I have read that the Jaguar was nearer than you might think to being positioned for 3D graphics and the world of Tomb Raider and Wipeout than many imagine. A little bit less cost-cutting might have made a huge difference (e.g., 2 mb of RAM), but even then, it feels to me like we are arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Except the PlayStation is the iceberg. And the Jaguar was possibly a tugboat.

Better games were to follow, but only after all the oxygen had been let out of the Jaguar balloon. There were only 70 something games released for the Jaguar, and only about 11 released for the Jaguar CD add on, that somehow made it to market. Sadly, the 3d headset never made it, but working prototypes existed.

There are however, despite it all, genuinely good games on the Jaguar, and games that really were ahead of their time, they were just few and far between.

If you watch YouTube, there are several negative reviews of Alien vs Predator. I remember seeing that on release and being blown away by the digitalised graphics. But beyond the graphics, the gameplay is excellent. It is one of the first real survival horror games, and the enemy AI was so far ahead of the time I suspect people were confused by what they were playing. Playing Alien vs Predator in 2022, I am genuinely blown away by it. Here is a taste of what a post 16-bit gaming future might have looked like, a rare example where “do the math” added up.

It was a huge coup, to somehow get id making Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Both are great versions on the Jaguar, and famously the Jaguar version was coded by John Romeo himself.

Doom shipped without music (almost certainly, so it could ship in time for Christmas). People criticise the Jaguar version of Doom, but unless you had a fortune to spend on a PC it was the best affordable way to play Doom. The 3DO version famously was given a better review in a well-known magazine than the Jaguar version, despite it being clearly worse and in a small letter box window. Jaguar Doom was full screen and runs smoothly. Perhaps the business practices and general caustic nature of the Trammels was catching up to them.

There are glimpses of the power of the Jaguar in games like Rayman, beautiful 2d sprites but sadly the future of gaming was 3D, something the Jaguar wasn’t well placed to do.

Why was there no Street Fighter 2? or Mortal Kombat 3? (Promised at 1 point) Why did they get almost no publishers on board? A toxic mixture of poor sales and horrible business practices.

There are some real stinkers on the Jaguar – they never should have been released in their current form. Kasumi Ninja is a poor man’s Mortal Kombat that controls badly but compared to Fight for Life (another Jaguar fighter roughly ripped up of Virtua Fighter) Kasumi Ninja is the model of competence. Chequered Flag wanted to be Virtua Racing but was broken. How much did the Trammels worry about giving the consumer value for money? They seemed far more interested in ripping off the customer, or vendors in the short term, there seemed little thought of where any of this is leading. The only positive story I heard of this nature was Sam Trammel allowing Alien vs Predator to be put on a 4mb cart, rather than the usual 2mb. This definitely meant a better product for the consumer, at a higher cost to Atari.

In hindsight, did the Jaguar ever really stand a chance? Sony had an outrageous budget and was relentlessly getting everything right with the PlayStation. Sony were the only company that was well placed for 3D gaming to take over (Sega, Atari and even Nintendo weren’t really prepared for this, and nor was the architecture of their consoles). Unlike most disruptive challengers (e.g., the 3DO company) Sony also had tonnes of cash to sink into every aspect of the business, and they did it in a way that left little room for error. They threw money at great developers, and gave them fantastic tools (for free, something that never would have occurred to the Trammels, who refused to give out Jaguars, to even the biggest of publishers or game review sites). Everyone had to pay.

Almost certainly, the emergence and domination of Sony in the games space has been a very good thing for consumers. Buying a PlayStation 5 or a new Xbox represents very little risk, on behalf of the consumer. The machines are very similar. There is an established “right way” to go about building a games console. However, as a man pushing 40, I miss the wacky, weird, wild west that was gaming before 1994 and Sony changed gaming forever.

A lot has been made of Atari ditching their Panther console and delaying for the release of the Jaguar, but given the two choices, Atari almost certainly made the right call in this regard. The Jaguar was caught in a small window of time between the glorious games of the 16-bit machines and the coming CD based PlayStation. We don’t talk about the PlayStation as a 32-bit system, and I think this is directly because the Jaguar showed us that worrying about the bits really doesn’t matter. What matters are the games, and even if you want to focus on the power of a console, the bits is too simplistic. If you can see Tekken or Ridge Racer running, or Final Fantasy 7, who is going to tell you that at 64 bits the Jaguar is “twice as good”.

A late in the day law suit meant Sega handed over a fortune to Atari, and opened up the possibility of Sega games on the Jaguar, but by this point Atari had no way of keeping in the game, they had cancelled a huge number of titles, some 2D games that looked truly brilliant never made it to market. Sega should have done what the Trammels likely would have done, were the situation were reversed. Stall in paying until the Atari tugboat went down in the icy waters.

Lifetime sales of the Jaguar were flat out lied about, and the Trammels continued to lie about the health and future prospects of both Atari and the Jaguar, when they knew they were just trying to get rid of stock. At the end, they struggled to shift consoles for 50 US dollars, demand was so low at that point.

Since the demise, a steady trickle of games have released on the Jaguar, as HASBRO bought on the rights and declared it an open platform. Worms was released in the late 90s and to this day, passionate developers continue to put games out on the console. I am currently waiting for Xenon 2, Speedball 2 and the Chaos Engine.

As lifetime console sales were perhaps as low as 150,000 units, the console is very expensive today. It would be on a par with a Playstation 5 and games on eBay run into the hundreds of dollars. I was lucky enough to pick my console up in the local retro game shop for 200 Euros (I was quoted as 150 but as I drove over there to pick it up, the shop owner got suspicious by my eagerness and had a look on Ebay). He let me have it, plus a controller, Cybermorph and Alien vs Predator for 200, but minus the power cable. Naturally, the console, it turns out was not functioning, but a quick trip to the “Jaguar hospital” later and a very kind man had it running beautifully.

I was then lucky enough to get a Game Drive on eBay for 150 euros, rather than what the 300 the scalpers charge. A game drive is a cartridge that you can load ROMS onto, thus I have the entire Jaguar library loaded onto a single cartridge.

Is the Jaguar worth what I paid for it? No. If I was recommending a retro console for someone to play, it would be a Dreamcast, a SNES, an N64 for cost vs. fun ratios. I would seriously look at the Evercade VS.

Does that mean I regret buying my Jaguar? Also no. There are a million questions, we can never answer regarding the Jaguar. Could it have run Quake? What if Mortal Kombat 3 came out? Doom 2? But really all that matters is what was released, and what the Jaguar really is in 2022, warts and all is cool. I enjoy playing Alien vs Predator, Tempest 2000, Iron Soldier and as an Amiga kid, Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder, Theme Park and Syndicate are all a big deal for me. The difficulty of keeping floppy disks alive means I am happy to have these games in ROM form, saved on my PC and on my Gamedrive (perfectly legally). The Jaguar is a folly, but a fascinating one that is also fun to play.