Speculation: "2.5 million preorders" might have originally been "2.5 million _dollars worth of_ preorders" or ~10,000 consoles, which is actually pretty plausible.
I'm an audiologist, and after working in the same hearing test booth for several years, one day I realized all the power cords powering the speakers in the booth said "Atari Jaguar" on them. That booth was built in the mid 90s, so I can only guess Atari couldn't even sell their remaining stock and cannibalized their remaining Jaguars for parts and sold what they could to various electronics and medical companies technology companies. I've heard that they painted a lot of the shells to their consoles white and sold them to dental instrument companies as a holder for dentistry instruments too.
Yes, ive seen them in use at my dentist office. White jaguar mounted to the wall. Showed my dentist a photo of the atari jaguar and we laughed about it. I asked if it could run doom as well lol.
One curious side effect of the Jaguar's failure was that they sold the Jaguar molds to a company called Imagin, who later repurposed them as dental equipment. They were then purchased by Mike Kennedy for his console/scam the Coleco Chameleon.
Something also interesting is that the unsold Sega 32x consoles were converted into a Sega camera called 'picture magic' in Japan. The two systems have so much in common including their game library that for them both to be repurposed as cameras is honestly ironic, astounding and sad at the same time.
@@Zaphod-ef9yz And even more funny that the 32X put out better looking games than the Jaguar, it was either actually more powerful or was much easier to program for.
@@thecunninlynguist Same reason Apple does Lightening instead of USB C: money. Sony said it was because of security reasons but that's a bunch of bull.
Kim Justice has a few videos that go into pretty decent detail regarding Atari’s product decisions. They’re worth looking up, especially when it comes to Jack Tremeil’s takeover of the consumer division of Atari.
Well the only reason they succeeded for a while was because the bar was still set very very low during the early days of video games. But then Jaguar had to shoot themselves in the foot. Seriously, if nostalgia didn't play a part, their games are horrible.
You gotta admit though the outcome wasn't surprising, it was a product of its time where almost everyone at least in america was screaming "MORE BITS IS BETTER GRAPHICS" 24/7.
Selection of games actually doesn't mean anything judging by PS5. It has only like 3-4 exclusives games after two years on the market, the rest 99% of the library are PS4 games and it is still selling like crazy for some reason.
can’t believe you didn’t mention how some unsold jaguars were turned into dentist equipment. there’s a dentist building in my area that used to be a pizza hut. whenever we drive by it i always wonder if there’s a dental machine that used to be a jaguar, in this dentist office that used to be a pizza hut
Already answered this, but it's not really an important facet to the story. Wanted to keep it focused on what actually happened during the development of the Jaguar, and the problems it had. Video was also getting a bit long as well.
I remember my dad getting me a Jaguar for Christmas in 1995. The disappointment I felt come Christmas day was overwhelming because I wanted, and thought I was getting a PS1.
The real tragedy is that the Jaguar could draw more than half as many polygones as the PlayStation 1... if only ATARI had put the tools out there before dropping that almost cooked machine into stores.
11:10 Fun fact: The same is true of the Lynx, at least in North America. It came out roughly 2 months before the Genesis (Mega Drive), and for that brief window, it probably was the single most powerful console on the market. Too good for this world, indeed.
cuz the era of jap consoles was taking over. nintendo was a gateway to that. no american video game consoles were ever relevant in gaming in nes era to 2000s. until i think microsoft n its xbox leached its way in. after the dreamcast sad demise. tho i wish atari really learned it lessons and made more success of the jag. but their cheating ads n shady tactics n just sad oversights of many things sealed the jags fate. its a pity. i wish some devs could show what it can really do. crazy how it kinda ranks up there with SOA and their bad decisions end of genesis life n sega saturn debut in the states. RIP Atari. wish yall stay'd in the game...
I saw in my Lynx's manual that it literally states it is the most powerful console. Seems like they just threw it in there, since the Bit Wars didn't really start after the Genesis/MD. "Look at this! Backlighting! 4096 colors! Oh, and it pulls off 16 bits and 15 MHz portably." I guess the release of the Gameboy at the time put some focus on screens. Neat little (big) console.
both the Turbografx16 and Genesis debuted in North America in August'89, the Lynx's NA debut was September'89. The hardware is interesting and certainly powerful for a handheld of the time, but it was really no better than an "8 bit" experience.
Ah yes, I remember the later half of never quite fondly. Sam Tramiel's not so passive aggressive interviews are hilarious. Reminds me of Tom Zito defending Digital Pictures' games to journalists. Great video, I give it two 32 bits.
My brother and I had one as kids, bought it used pre-TH-cam era for like $40. Sadly never had Tempest 2000 or AvP, but at least we got to grow up quoting "Where did you learn to fly?" every time the other screwed up doing anything. Brutal Sports Football was the only great game we had for it. Super Burnout was pretty solid but nothing special. The other few games we had were all pure crap, though.
Oh you had AVP2 Gold on PC? Man what memories i have from that game. Hiding on the vaulted ceiling above a health pack and dropping down on a marine to head bite instajib him thinking he was safe with his lil med pack XD
At the very least, the Jaguar enjoys a small but dedicated following, with new homebrew games being produced to this very day. As a former owner of two Atari Jaguar consoles, i can say that it was not a bad console by any means. I certainly enjoyed it more than the CD-i. (P.S.: Shoutout to Rich Whitehouse, the author of the recent Jaguar emulator in both the Atari 50 collection and the recently released BigPEmu)
I remember drooling over the Jaguar as a kid. After all, it had more bits and (in my young mind) cooler games than our SNES. It was heavily pushed in my local toy store as well; they placed it top shelf and had multiple consoles running a demo. My parents wouldn’t budge though. Looking back, they probably saw through the marketing bs, since they bought my sister and me a PlayStation as soon as it launched.
Man the 90s was the wild west of videogame consoles because there was so many. I remember seeing big cardboard boxes advertising the jaguar but man they just all disappeared so fast and quick.
I can recall seeing what looked a LOT like an Atari Jaguar on the wall housing dental equipment at my dentist's office many times as a kid. Only many, many years later did I find out the truth. Those actually WERE Atari Jaguar console molds. Apparently, when the Jaguar went down in flames, taking Atari with it, a large number of what were intended to be console shells were bought up by a dental company, which repurposed them to house dental imaging equipment.
Chipping away at the Jaguar games in Atari 50, I can definitely appreciate what the console was trying to do at the time. So far, Atari Karts and Fight for Life are definite highlights for me
I've been using the new Jaguar emulator that just came out, and honestly the version of Rayman on there is pretty great even though that game got ported to so many other systems, but the Jaguar version has different final stages to the PS1 version apparently. Tempest 2000 is also great and is included in the 50th collection.
@@emanuelepolloni4002 Yeah, both the Lynx and Jaguar selections were pretty poor, especially the Lynx. I understand there were a lot of rights issues, but they really should have tried a bit harder to get some of the licenses back. They even cut a Lynx game which had been advertised due to rights problems!
@@jasonblalock4429 What was the Lynx game that got cut? I wish they could have at least gotten the rights to Chip's Challenge on Lynx, that was its original platform!
Somebody certainly did their homework! (I see my site cited as a source - thanks for that!) So glad to see the real version of events surrounding this era of Atari starting to circulate after years of misinformation. Great video!
I had to special order most of my games from stand alone video game stores. Apparently they had so little confidence in the system they chose not to stock much in the way of games.
Probably the best Jag game I played was not actually AVP or Tempest 2000, even though they are both great games for the time, it's Iron Soldier - a little known first person mech sim that really hits the nail on the head. It was one of the few Jag games to get multiple sequels - first on the Jag CD and later on the PS1 with Iron Soldier 3. Definitely worth checking out for it's strategic action and sense of scale.
With my holiday work schedule getting more and more hectic, I'm happy to know that this highly-anticipated What Happened episode on the Jaguar could come along and help keep my mind off holiday-related stress for a while...cheers to you and the rest of the What Happened team, Matt! 😁
You could always tell how well a console was doing by how many were for sale in our local Cash Converters (UK chain of pawn shops). You rarely saw anything decent like a Mega Drive or a SNES, but there were always a few Saturns, plenty of 32X's, and loads of Jaguar consoles. They couldn't give the damn things away.
Pretty solid episode on Atari's last console. I imagine Commodore's history as well as their failed consoles of the C64GS and the Amiga CDTV/CD32 would make great episodes for this series
I bought one of these new back in the day. I also owned a 3DO so my judgment is suspect. The Jaguar has a really great Alien vs Predator game on it, which was a very solid FPS, and not much else.
it’s actually interesting how AVP age poorly at can be. It’s usually mentioned as best that jag has to offer by people who use to it back in the days and... And people who look at it now just see it and think “it it’s the best think jag have to offer it’s fucked up beyond recognition”
@@bubsy3861 At the end of the day it was a DOOM clone with an AvP skin on it but playing that alone in a dark room had some serious atmosphere. I honestly don't even remember playing anything else on the Jaguar while I do remember having a lot of fun with the 3DO.
I had an friend who owned the Atari Jaguar, and he had these games that I can remember the best: Kasumi Ninja, Doom, Checkered Flag, Cybermorph and Raiden. I thought it was cool console for the time in the 90's. I didn't analyze games and gaming hardware too much when I was younger, it was just about the games.
@@frankiebecchi5307 because it took precious time and resources nintendo wanted to use for the N64, so they forced the dev team to release it downscaled and unfinished as a stopgap until they have released N64
I was alive in the days of the $20 brand spanking new Virtual Boys in the clearance bins at Toys R Us and I STILL regret being too much of a dumb kid to ask for one. At that price point my parents would have ABSOLUTELY gotten me one. I similarly regret not asking for a Genesis the Christmas after I got my SNES. Deeply. Every Genesis I find at trade shows and retro shops now look like they were dug out of somebody's backyard, and as a kid my weird ass treated my gaming stuff like it was blown glass so it's STILL in damn near mint condition even though I played them CONSTANTLY. Well. I used to think I was just weird. Now that my younger sister has been diagnosed as autistic at 26 years old we're pretty damn sure I am too. It would certainly explain a lot. lol
Takes me back to glory days of the wild west that was gaming at the time. What other time could you walk into a music store and see three different versions (at least) of Street Fighter II, each claiming to be the next best thing to the Arcade. New to this channel, but I'm curious to see if you will cover the NeoGeo MVS, and how Sega with their Dreamcast held a parallel with it in theory.
Are we ever going to get an episode of What Happened to Alone in the Dark (2008)? That game was a lot like Deadly Premonition in that it was an overly ambitious survival horror game that tried to force way too much stuff into it and inevitably fell short of the developers’ aspirations because of budget and time crunch. It had the potential to be so much better, but it suffered from janky controls/mechanics and a bunch of glitches. I honestly really like the game and I can see how great it could’ve been if they took some more time to polish it out it’s flaws. There were a lot of good things that the game had going for it, like the soundtrack, which totally rocks! The music was frickin’ incredible and they did a phenomenal job with the sound design. It would be a perfect game for an episode of What Happened?
I think an episode would be excellent. Wont lie when you said you liked it though, I genuinely wish I could level with that opinion. Recently been playing it to experience it, and damn I genuinely regret it a bit lol.
@@Mosleyset2 It can definitely be frustrating at times. The shadow monster enemies that kill you if you touch the darkness for example are very annoying. It almost feels like pure luck whether or not you get killed by them. The driving levels are pretty irritating too. One mistake and you’ll end up getting killed and have to restart from the beginning. Hunting down and destroying all the evil roots is pretty boring too. It was clearly just padding to extend the game’s length and it adds nothing to the experience. Despite all that, I still genuinely enjoyed the game and I think that some parts of it were really cool. I especially liked the crafting system for instance, which lets you combine items to make weapons like molotov cocktails, and I already mentioned that the music was really well done. They got a lot of things right, but they also got a lot of things wrong too. The controls were janky and hard to get used to, the driving levels were unnecessarily difficult, and the game was riddled with bugs. I prefer to look at it from an optimistic perspective and focus on the game’s strengths rather than it’s faults, but I understand that’s not easy. If it’s not you’re cup of tea, then I can definitely see why, but personally I think it’s pretty decent. I’d give it like a solid 7/10.
Yeah Alone in the Dark 2008 I played the PS3 port dubbed Inferno and I had a good time with it and if it's development has a story to tell then yeah perfect for the show here for an episode of What Happened.
Having been a kid during the 90's i was all about the SNES and Mega Drive. Hell i even got a Mega CD, had friends with Game Gears and N64's and eventually saved for a PlayStation with paper round money (and the sold it to get a Saturn because i couldn't afford the games) and the first i ever heard of the Atari Jag was in the 00's, it was so rare here it might as well have not existed!
One of my greatest regrets was never picking up all the Jaguars and Sega 32x/CDs that were on clearance for 20 bucks back in the day at KB Toys. I guess the only solice I have is that I was under 10 at the time. But it never stopped me from wanting them.
There was a reason they were so cheap. No good games and the CD addons had terrible reliability. Turns out early CD players designed to be cheap console addons really were not built to last.
Should look into the troubled history of RoboCop. The first movie almost didn't happen several times. From the Director originally turning it down, to having to completely redo the robot suit, to not being able to work well in the suit, dangerous situations the actors were put in, and so on.
I saw one Jaguar for sale at one game store in the early 1990s. It was sitting in the window display as I walked by. I had no clue what it was at the time beyond a video game system, since I had never heard of it, and to this day I haven't seen another one in the real world.
I just wanted to hop in here and say that I love seeing the dancing Xenomorphs with hats at the intro. I was the sound designer on the Alien Descent VR game. Which is a whole “What Happened” in and of itself.
I’m from the UK and I remember as a Kid my local store were selling brand new boxed Jaguars for £10! I bought one then got rid of it. About 15 years later I bought a 2nd hand one for £150! Still have it now. In hindsight I should love definitely bought all of those Jaguar systems up.
Informative vid as always. Sadly, the only things that come to my mind in terms of troubled development are videogames, but here's a couple I'd be curious to hear about: - Wipeout Fusion, which was successful but it would be interesting to hear in more detail how it turned out to be so rough between studio acquisitions, developers infights, and release delays. - Freedom Wars, which was announced like a groundbreaking monster hunting exclusive for PS Vita but then turned out so messy japanese stores stopped taking used copies within one week. Btw I don't mean those games I mentioned to be bad, but playing them it does feel like something went wrong at somepoint. Also, Wipeout Fusion in particular has a nice selection of "heads" Matt could use for the vid thumbnail.
with freedom wars (of all games) getting a remaster in january next year, I'd wanna see what happened with that too. Played it a bit on my vita and it's something unique imo.
Gaming in the 90s was hard but fun As a gamer who did there homework when Jag released I did the math and found that Nintendo and Sega just had more games I wanted to play and with the PS1/N64 around the corner I knew the Jag was not it then the PS1 dropped with Ridge Racer and Jumping Flash so even the decision to get the Saturn was put on hold I did buy a Saturn well after the PS2 launch though
By the time the Jaguar released, Atari was already feeling like an old school gaming company putting out an old school retro console. Many felt that Atari was just going to go with its tried-and-true formula of taking some of their old popular games from the past and just updating them for their new console. The problem with that is that by the time the Jaguar released, those games was already outdated, and most gamers by that time were into more advanced games. Gamers also knew that Atari just wasn't going to be able to compete with the quality of games that was coming out for the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. I remember walking into a toy store at the mall and being excited to see the Atari Jaguar on display in a small section of the store. The games were tiny in comparison to Nintendo and Sega who had a huge selection of games. I was interested to see those 64-bit graphics Atari was bragging about in their commercials. Unfortunately, the game that the store had on display didn't exactly blow me away. In fact, what I saw didn't look too far off from what the Super Nintendo was pushing at the time. Also, that controller was huge and had that old school keypad. That said, Nintendo had first party titles like Mario, Metroid, and Zelda. Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog, Altered Beast, and Streets of Rage. Atari had Pac Man, Tempest, Defender, and Breakout, 🙄. That prospect wasn't exactly bringing excitement to the console lol😂
Never understood the Cybermorph joke "where did you learnt to fly?", I have the Jag and this game, and first thing I did was learn the controls, if people keep hitting mountains, they're very unskilled players, it's actually very easy to pilot the spaceship in the game.
Watching the vid in full gave me bit of a nostalgia trip, one of my friends had the jaguar and had a few games among them was Alien vs Predator, there were a few other games but that one just stood out to the rest.
A few years back I was carousing LetGo and a lady near me had a boxed Jaguar with an extra controller and 4 games...for $65!!!....I messaged her like a stalker trying to get it but she never responded and the listing stayed up like she abandoned the app or something. I wanted that SO bad.
A friend of mine did some dev work for Jag, he said that due to their janky architecture, only one of the processors would function properly. Tom would do great work, but then Jerry would go do whatever he wanted to do... Usually trying to kill the cat. It made it maddeningly difficult to write good games
There is only one system bus. Tom and Jerry can work well, but when any of them wants to access memory ( the famous 64 bit ) or talk with each other, thing got slow pretty fast. So you could try to cram sound into the 8kB and just pull a midi note per frame / an event for a sound. And you could load a simple mesh into the DSP and rotate it ( the Jaguar cube ) and use the bus only to get the rotation quaternion from the game engine. Then comes the blitter which also uses this bus, often in an inefficient manner. Unlike the DSP or GPU the blitter cannot hold to itself and do some work on its own. It hogs the bus totally unprepared. And then it does some work, then it has to do some internal state machine thingy .. all the while nobody else is allowed to use the 64 bit. DSP and GPU are 32 bit anyway and DSP like 68k (32bit registers) has to got through a 16 bit bottleneck. 48 bits wasted.
Does anybody tech savvy here know if cybermorph has truly unique source code unlike any game or demo before it? I guess what I'm trying to say is is cybermorphs source code unlike anything that came before it?
I had my choice of a Sega CD or a Jaguar for making the honor roll for the year in '95. I went with the Sega CD and never regretted it. Glad I did because I still have my physical copy of my favorite game of all time, Snatcher.
I bought one of those $99 Jags when I was in the states in '95. Still have it. They were selling off all the games as well. Was awesome! Also picked up that Atari 50th collection for Switch. Wow, it's awesome as well!
I remember buying 2 Jaguars when plus the JagLink & 2 copies of Doom for multiplayer on separate TVs. Worked perfectly and was pretty enjoyable at the time.
I have been waiting for this video since I found this series 😭😭😭 I grew up with this dumb system, this was my childhood! Edit to admit that I have 3 jags, a working cd player and most of the games. Yes, am I bragging.
Nice to see this story on this channel Matt, I remember all the ads in the mags and yeah, we were all taken in by the bit craze.....this was the wake up call lol. Next, why not cover Atari's competition in the computer market, the Commodore Amiga, from the humble but troubled A1000 to the end with the Amiga CD32. Starting with a machine that became a monster for games, pissed on whatever the IBM PC could do for games in the early 90s, but slowly failed to keep up and fell as time ticked away.
Fun Fact Matt McMuscles about the Cybermorph pack-in game, the reason it became one was because according to the behind the scene interviews originally the now-infamous Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy game was originally going to be the pack in-game/mascot game to compete with Mario and Sonic back when the Panther/Jaguar consoles where in development respectively, but it fall through at the last minute/eleventh hour when the near final game/final main character Trevor McFur where both shown off to the higher up-executives only to be totally unimpressed with and saying this would not cut it as far as being a pack in-game/mascot game to compete with Mario and Sonic like they had hoped for hence why Cybermorph was chosen in the end. But it all does add-up when you consider the following such as the Sonic the Hedgehog amphomorphic animal mascot fad crazy in the early 90's, but also considering the pack in-game influence being Mario vs Sonic rivalry and given the big cat themes of the Panther/Jaguar console projects and even the associated Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy game and Trevor McFur main character. It sure does make a whole lot of sense after all! But man just imagine what a big disasterus reality the bad rep of the Atari Jaguar console/associated game/main character could have been if the original plan A vision went through which fortunately did not in the end. Heck this would have made the now-infamous Keith Courage in Alpha Zones on the TurboGrafx-16 look like Mario and Sonic, and the Trevor McFur main character could have been almost as big of a laughing stock as Bubsy bobcat which is rather ironic considering both the Trevor McFur main character and Bubsy bobcat both coming out in the same 1993 year an the former (Bubsy) getting his very own Jaguar spin-off game a year later, LOL!
I'm in New Zealand, and I never saw a Jaguar in my life here. I do remember seeing an ad for it in a friends (UK) gaming magazine in 1996 and thinking 'oh wow that looks cool', the ad made it look like it was on par with a Saturn or something, and I'd only associated Atari with blocky 2600 games prior to this. Now in the internet era where i've watched multiple video's about it over the years, it's so frustrating watching these consoles/games makers make decisions based on greed, getting things out for sale before they are refined/ready. E.T. and Pacman on Atari 2600 for example. Sega 32X, an unnecessary add on, created BECAUSE of Sega's fear of the Atari jaguar. I have a soft spot for many of these "failed' consoles. Saturn, Dreamcast, Sega Cd, 32X and also the Jaguar. They all have their hidden gems, and I often feel 'oh what could have been' with them.
Atari Jaguar would’ve been quite popular in Europe due to Atari having a much larger base in Europe from the being a top PC maker at the time. It’s weird to think, but in the early 90’s Atari was a bigger name in Europe.
Maybe mainland Europe but here in Scotland commodore, Sega, and Nintendo were huge, I only heard of the jaguar in the late 90s so cleary didn't get much exposure here.
Funny story. Early in this video I accidentally changed the playback speed to 25% without realizing it, and I thought that the video was deliberately slowing down because Matt was making a point about the Jaguar's poor processing power. I kept watching it like that for 5 minutes before I figured it out.
You know, you say that, and I really hope one of your thoughts was akin to "Wow. Matt either REALLY needs to get some sleep, or lay off the novocaine".
It wasn't so much poor processing as it was giving too much attention to a weaker 68k and a totally lame dev kit. Tom and Jerry were quite powerful chips used in a very poorly thought out system design.
Excellent video! ... I was always curious about the Jag at the time because games were often reviewed in magazines, but there were no Jaguars being sold in my country. I also remember looking at game reviews and thinking "man, this is 64 bit, but they do not look much better than SNES games"
I'd find that interesting as that game had about 8 years of development. This is roughly the same amount of time as Persona 5 (which is a gem) and Final Fantasy 7 Remake (which, like FFXV, is also a discordant mess). Final Fantasy 12 started development not long after Final Fantasy 10's release (so 6-7 years) and it's a great game whose strained development can be seen in places.
I want to see one on Final Fantasy XIV. It had a notoriously awful launch and to turn things around they ended up rebuilding the entire thing from the ground up.
You really have to wonder what kind of games we would've seen if the 3 chips had been fully utilized. Just with the Motorola alone, developers were able to put out games that were comparable to something you'd see on the sega 32x. Maybe some fan project will answer that question some day.
All those good looking games at the end ( or after ) life of the Jaguar use all 3 chips. Fully utilized I would say because homebrew is not even in the same class, yet.
Konix were amazing, I had the Konix Speedking II joystick. I loved the moulded to the hand shape design. It felt completely different to the classic stick on a square base.
This was a fun walk down memory lane. We had a Jaguar when it first came out at our household. While I recall the fighting games (Kasumi Ninja and fucking Dragon: The Bruce Lee story!) not being good... like, at all, it was the first system I got to play DOOM on, so it'll always have a special place in my heart for that. Imagine my surprise when I played it on the computer a couple of years later and heard music! Ha ha! And Alien vs. Predator was awesome too; still years away from the PC games, that was the best AVP game I could have ever hoped for at the time. That game came with three slip covers for the controller depending on the character you were playing. It was a cool novelty, but I remember it being a pain to get those covers on. Still a great game, regardless.
A supermarket in town here in England had a bin of Jaguars sat in the middle of the store for months here. I think it may have been '96, but could've been early, but they just sat there for £20 for months and seemingly no one bought any. That's how poorly received the thing was.
A friend of mine had a Jaguar and let me play this dirt bike game. I remember it graphically looking like a slightly better version of Star Fox and playing twice as slow and very choppy. Knowing what I do about the processors now makes a lot more sense and is borderline infuriating.
To be fair... Atari was the final nail in Atari's coffin. So many bad decisions on all their hardware consoles from the XEGS all the way up to the Jaguar. All great hardware with idiots at the helm. It should not surprise anyone since the Tramiels were not fans of gaming.
Any chance we could have a video on the Atari Lynx. Surely it's development from Handy with Epyx to being sold to Atari Corp. Would give it plenty of history to dive into. Plus the games were actually fantastic Atari Games ports, which Atari failed to pay them properly which caused them to not support the Jaguar. Imagine jaguar with stun runner
The Neo Geo seems like the way you'd market a console like the Jaguar correctly. SNK knew that they couldn't compete with Sega and Nintendo directly, and that their cutting edge console would be too expensive for the average household. So they made one powerful system that appealed to arcades, as well as the slice of home gamers who would pay anything for the best hardware. Also didn't hurt that SNK was actually capable of making their own great games.
The funny thing is Jack wasn't lying about the Jaguars power, since if the Homebrewers are to be believed the Jaguar when coded properly could rival the PS1. So essentially had Atari not shot themselves in the foot by providing proper documentation and dev kits the Jaguar may have been a force to be recokoned with during the 5th gen of gaming.
Studios need to develop games, and develop them fast. Whoever at Atari thought they didn't need documentation should have been fired on the spot. Atari was correct in making a powerful system, but you cannot sell a console on power alone. Powerful Console + games that utilize said power = profit. Do the math.
The idea that the Jaguar is somehow able to run a game like Dino Crisis, Tekken 3 or Final Fantasy 8 at even close to the same level of graphical and audio level quality is uh, not likely.
@@MattMcMuscles Well, not those kind of games but canned projects such as Phear (th-cam.com/video/o457jl9zZbs/w-d-xo.html ) and Konan (th-cam.com/video/b_pSPsqg8V8/w-d-xo.html ) did showed that the Jaguar was more of a robust 3D system but a powerhouse in 2D.
Maybe if they decided to ship it as the first CD-based console too, otherwise it's hard to compete with the first native CD console in terms of making development so much easier
What homebrews would you recommend to check? More in general, what places and channels where one could get a better idea? I knew about the Jaguar enjoying a nice community of dedicated fans to this day (just like the ones who did and still do games for the Dreamcast, or even for the now 40 years old C64) but never really checked closely.
Great video. I got to play some Jaguar games as part of that 50th Anniversary collection that Atari put out. None are what I would call masterpieces, but they were charming and fun enough. Sad to see this was the last hurrah for the great innovator, though.
Even at 15 years old and not having nearly the access to information that we have today I knew the Jaguar wasn't what they were advertising it to be. I also hated those commercials with the snarky teacher. I also started off with a 2600 and a large number of games, since they were so cheap after the crash I wound up with s bunch of them. I played them alot but honestly the box art was generally more entertaining than the games. Other than Pitfall none of them had any goal to them outside of a high score and all had a very simple gameplay loop. You could see everything they had to offer in about five minutes. When I got an NES some years later it was amazing how much better all the games were. As far as home systems go I think the leap from Atari to Nintendo was the biggest jump. There's a case for the 16 bit to 32bit/PlayStation jump was the biggest, but I'm still going with Nintendo making the biggest leap.
I had TVBoy in the 90s with like 200 atari games prebuilt in. I got bored with it in about an hour, they were just simple 5 minute time wasters (except maybe Adventure.) Nintendo games were on another level.
All I remember about this console is that the commercials were cringe to the point I had zero interest in what they were selling. No other kids I knew owned or wanted one 😅
Ultimately the Atari Jaguar was a great idea and cutting edge piece of hardware ruined by a mix of poor documentation, infamous dev kit bugs which forced developers to either rush games out the door, or work within the framework of the “bridge chip” Motorola 68K instead of the Tom and Jerry chips, and Atari’s financial struggles. I do think had the Jaguar either spent longer in the oven to address these issues, or Atari secured more 3rd party support before rushing to market we might still best case scenario see a Dreamcast like story with the Jaguar because again Atari was in a bad spot financially to begin with.
The Object Processor in Tom is actually the oldest design the Jaguar ( besides the 68k ). The DSP and GPU originally were not supposed to be suited for general purpose. DSP like on the SNES or SID. Weird people work with them and somehow create sound ( PoV probably of the Managers ). Then uh, we need a GPU to do the dirty rasterization and triangle set-up. So another team of nerds with too much math for Managers to understand. Thus the 68k was kept at the helm (working compiler, toolbox for debugging). I mean, DSP and GPU had weird bugs, but at least capable engineers were on board to solve a lot of them in the crunch. JRISC quality is like 10 levels above the rest of the design.
Distribution issues aside, their other big fail was pushing Tempest as if it was some great techno logical achievement or a desirable game. They should have just ran footage of Alien Vs Predator in every add. The gameplay wasn't that great but the graphics for the time and the Predator visual spectrum changes were stunning.
Speculation: "2.5 million preorders" might have originally been "2.5 million _dollars worth of_ preorders" or ~10,000 consoles, which is actually pretty plausible.
"$2.5 million IN pre-orders" actually makes perfect sense.
@@HonkeyKongLive that's straight Dwight Schrute "Assistant TO the Regional Manager" stuff 😂
@@whosaidthat84 🙄 that joke comes from the original Office.
@@TOBAPNW_ and? The Office USA is way more popular and known.
@@TOBAPNW_ feels like you were trying to make a point but stopped halfway through...
I'm an audiologist, and after working in the same hearing test booth for several years, one day I realized all the power cords powering the speakers in the booth said "Atari Jaguar" on them. That booth was built in the mid 90s, so I can only guess Atari couldn't even sell their remaining stock and cannibalized their remaining Jaguars for parts and sold what they could to various electronics and medical companies technology companies. I've heard that they painted a lot of the shells to their consoles white and sold them to dental instrument companies as a holder for dentistry instruments too.
They sold the molds. Paint that would stick to the plastic used is prone to flaking, not something you want in a (pseudo?)surgical environment.
Jaguars or their shells were even used for teeth x-ray machines.
Yes, ive seen them in use at my dentist office. White jaguar mounted to the wall. Showed my dentist a photo of the atari jaguar and we laughed about it. I asked if it could run doom as well lol.
@@barrybb5409 Doom theme might certainly make dentist visits at least somewhat more pleasant experiences.
One curious side effect of the Jaguar's failure was that they sold the Jaguar molds to a company called Imagin, who later repurposed them as dental equipment.
They were then purchased by Mike Kennedy for his console/scam the Coleco Chameleon.
I'd like to see a Chameleon Wha Happun
@@phooeyfudge lol, remember the clown put a capture card in the transparent shell and tried to pass it off!
Something also interesting is that the unsold Sega 32x consoles were converted into a Sega camera called 'picture magic' in Japan. The two systems have so much in common including their game library that for them both to be repurposed as cameras is honestly ironic, astounding and sad at the same time.
@@Zaphod-ef9yz Wow I absolutely had no idea whatsoever about that! Thank you for sharing that!
@@Zaphod-ef9yz And even more funny that the 32X put out better looking games than the Jaguar, it was either actually more powerful or was much easier to program for.
It’s only a matter of time before the PSVITA gets its time in the spotlight on this show…
This is the one episode that I'm waiting for
Vita means life. Vita deserved better than Sony gave it.
@@thecunninlynguist Same reason Apple does Lightening instead of USB C: money. Sony said it was because of security reasons but that's a bunch of bull.
@The CunninLynguist I know. I bet you they were trying to be greedy.
@@thecunninlynguist I think the PS Vita memoey cards were made with low quality flash.
Entire history of Atari needs a What Happened episode. How that icon fall down so hard, is a fascinating story.
Basically they had early success with 0 quality control in their games. The NES largely succeeded by learning from Atari's mistakes.
One of my friends put it as: "Atari was always going to explode and nothing could have stopped it. It's just etched into the universe."
Kim Justice has a few videos that go into pretty decent detail regarding Atari’s product decisions. They’re worth looking up, especially when it comes to Jack Tremeil’s takeover of the consumer division of Atari.
Well the only reason they succeeded for a while was because the bar was still set very very low during the early days of video games. But then Jaguar had to shoot themselves in the foot. Seriously, if nostalgia didn't play a part, their games are horrible.
They coulda had a life saving deal with Nintendo they fumbled that bag majorly
Atari were so focused on hardware and marketing that they forgot to give the console a beloved mascot and decent selection of games.
You gotta admit though the outcome wasn't surprising, it was a product of its time where almost everyone at least in america was screaming "MORE BITS IS BETTER GRAPHICS" 24/7.
Selection of games actually doesn't mean anything judging by PS5. It has only like 3-4 exclusives games after two years on the market, the rest 99% of the library are PS4 games and it is still selling like crazy for some reason.
Or a decent controller. No idea what they were thinking with that monstrosity.
@@WholeWheatBagels See also original Xbox first controller.
It's like they forgot that consoles had the ABILITY to have mascots in their games by then.
can’t believe you didn’t mention how some unsold jaguars were turned into dentist equipment.
there’s a dentist building in my area that used to be a pizza hut. whenever we drive by it i always wonder if there’s a dental machine that used to be a jaguar, in this dentist office that used to be a pizza hut
Already answered this, but it's not really an important facet to the story. Wanted to keep it focused on what actually happened during the development of the Jaguar, and the problems it had. Video was also getting a bit long as well.
@@MattMcMuscles i getcha! excellent and very thorough video as always.
They never turned unsold Jaguars into dental equipment. They repurposed some of the molds into producing dental equipment.
@@hypnobearcoup2505 yeah i know, i meant that they repurposed the shells for dental equipment lol
@@MattMcMuscles dude.. hbomberguy just made an hour long video about the roblox oof.. 24 minutes isnt long at all
Holy shit, I can't think of a worse fate for Sega than being forced to buy Atari stock in the 90s.
Okay, that's hilarious and probably worst punisment.
@@protocetid I want to visit the parallel universe where Sega said yes.
@@protocetid Time to build that portal gun.
Maybe being in the audience when Sony said "$299".
@@nemesis3587 it would be a punishment deserved for Sega for their arrogance.
"What do we do if we can't unload these unsold Jaguars?"
_Starts eying New Mexico landfill_
I remember my dad getting me a Jaguar for Christmas in 1995. The disappointment I felt come Christmas day was overwhelming because I wanted, and thought I was getting a PS1.
but did you liked the altari jeguar?
The real tragedy is that the Jaguar could draw more than half as many polygones as the PlayStation 1... if only ATARI had put the tools out there before dropping that almost cooked machine into stores.
11:10 Fun fact: The same is true of the Lynx, at least in North America. It came out roughly 2 months before the Genesis (Mega Drive), and for that brief window, it probably was the single most powerful console on the market. Too good for this world, indeed.
cuz the era of jap consoles was taking over. nintendo was a gateway to that. no american video game consoles were ever relevant in gaming in nes era to 2000s. until i think microsoft n its xbox leached its way in. after the dreamcast sad demise.
tho i wish atari really learned it lessons and made more success of the jag. but their cheating ads n shady tactics n just sad oversights of many things sealed the jags fate. its a pity. i wish some devs could show what it can really do. crazy how it kinda ranks up there with SOA and their bad decisions end of genesis life n sega saturn debut in the states.
RIP Atari. wish yall stay'd in the game...
The games were very fun at the very least. Too bad we never got AVP on the Lnyx though...
Turbo Grafx 16
I saw in my Lynx's manual that it literally states it is the most powerful console. Seems like they just threw it in there, since the Bit Wars didn't really start after the Genesis/MD. "Look at this! Backlighting! 4096 colors! Oh, and it pulls off 16 bits and 15 MHz portably." I guess the release of the Gameboy at the time put some focus on screens. Neat little (big) console.
both the Turbografx16 and Genesis debuted in North America in August'89, the Lynx's NA debut was September'89. The hardware is interesting and certainly powerful for a handheld of the time, but it was really no better than an "8 bit" experience.
Ah yes, I remember the later half of never quite fondly. Sam Tramiel's not so passive aggressive interviews are hilarious. Reminds me of Tom Zito defending Digital Pictures' games to journalists.
Great video, I give it two 32 bits.
As a former Jaguar owner this hit me hard. At least I got the best Alien vs Predator experience ever.
My brother and I had one as kids, bought it used pre-TH-cam era for like $40. Sadly never had Tempest 2000 or AvP, but at least we got to grow up quoting "Where did you learn to fly?" every time the other screwed up doing anything.
Brutal Sports Football was the only great game we had for it. Super Burnout was pretty solid but nothing special. The other few games we had were all pure crap, though.
it had tempest too, so 2 good games
Doom, Wolfenstein, NBA Jam, Rayman were all great games on the Jaguar.
Oh you had AVP2 Gold on PC? Man what memories i have from that game. Hiding on the vaulted ceiling above a health pack and dropping down on a marine to head bite instajib him thinking he was safe with his lil med pack XD
Even today most AAA dev struggle with multi-core, multi-cpu and parallel execution.
At the very least, the Jaguar enjoys a small but dedicated following, with new homebrew games being produced to this very day. As a former owner of two Atari Jaguar consoles, i can say that it was not a bad console by any means. I certainly enjoyed it more than the CD-i. (P.S.: Shoutout to Rich Whitehouse, the author of the recent Jaguar emulator in both the Atari 50 collection and the recently released BigPEmu)
interested in Homebrew, is there a website to see stuff like that?
That’s not a very high recommendation
@@stevenpina1983 At the very least the Jag had more traditional games than the CD-i, if you catch my drift.
@@Bloodfont89 AtariAge might be your best bet.
@@KGRAMR That bar is so low it's in the ground.
I remember drooling over the Jaguar as a kid. After all, it had more bits and (in my young mind) cooler games than our SNES. It was heavily pushed in my local toy store as well; they placed it top shelf and had multiple consoles running a demo.
My parents wouldn’t budge though. Looking back, they probably saw through the marketing bs, since they bought my sister and me a PlayStation as soon as it launched.
Your mom and dad sound like the best and wanted the best for you.
Man the 90s was the wild west of videogame consoles because there was so many. I remember seeing big cardboard boxes advertising the jaguar but man they just all disappeared so fast and quick.
I can recall seeing what looked a LOT like an Atari Jaguar on the wall housing dental equipment at my dentist's office many times as a kid. Only many, many years later did I find out the truth. Those actually WERE Atari Jaguar console molds. Apparently, when the Jaguar went down in flames, taking Atari with it, a large number of what were intended to be console shells were bought up by a dental company, which repurposed them to house dental imaging equipment.
Chipping away at the Jaguar games in Atari 50, I can definitely appreciate what the console was trying to do at the time. So far, Atari Karts and Fight for Life are definite highlights for me
Shame that some of the best games can’t be included for licensing reasons
I've been using the new Jaguar emulator that just came out, and honestly the version of Rayman on there is pretty great even though that game got ported to so many other systems, but the Jaguar version has different final stages to the PS1 version apparently.
Tempest 2000 is also great and is included in the 50th collection.
@@That-Other-Dan Considering trying Tempest 2000 next 👍
@@emanuelepolloni4002 Yeah, both the Lynx and Jaguar selections were pretty poor, especially the Lynx. I understand there were a lot of rights issues, but they really should have tried a bit harder to get some of the licenses back. They even cut a Lynx game which had been advertised due to rights problems!
@@jasonblalock4429 What was the Lynx game that got cut?
I wish they could have at least gotten the rights to Chip's Challenge on Lynx, that was its original platform!
Somebody certainly did their homework! (I see my site cited as a source - thanks for that!)
So glad to see the real version of events surrounding this era of Atari starting to circulate after years of misinformation. Great video!
The fact that at 04:52 you can see Flair's own thoughts about the console on the board sums it up perfectly.
I can’t believe how long it took me to get that joke. -_-;
does anybody know if cybermorph has a truly unique source code unlike any game or demo before it? If so i would like to know thanks
I remember buying the Jaguar, calling around for games and finding two. Tempest and AVP. The buyers remorse was instant.
There probably still was retailer backlash against the Atari name after the crash of 1983-4.
I had to special order most of my games from stand alone video game stores. Apparently they had so little confidence in the system they chose not to stock much in the way of games.
Probably the best Jag game I played was not actually AVP or Tempest 2000, even though they are both great games for the time, it's Iron Soldier - a little known first person mech sim that really hits the nail on the head. It was one of the few Jag games to get multiple sequels - first on the Jag CD and later on the PS1 with Iron Soldier 3. Definitely worth checking out for it's strategic action and sense of scale.
With my holiday work schedule getting more and more hectic, I'm happy to know that this highly-anticipated What Happened episode on the Jaguar could come along and help keep my mind off holiday-related stress for a while...cheers to you and the rest of the What Happened team, Matt! 😁
You could always tell how well a console was doing by how many were for sale in our local Cash Converters (UK chain of pawn shops). You rarely saw anything decent like a Mega Drive or a SNES, but there were always a few Saturns, plenty of 32X's, and loads of Jaguar consoles. They couldn't give the damn things away.
Pretty solid episode on Atari's last console. I imagine Commodore's history as well as their failed consoles of the C64GS and the Amiga CDTV/CD32 would make great episodes for this series
I bought one of these new back in the day. I also owned a 3DO so my judgment is suspect. The Jaguar has a really great Alien vs Predator game on it, which was a very solid FPS, and not much else.
it’s actually interesting how AVP age poorly at can be. It’s usually mentioned as best that jag has to offer by people who use to it back in the days and... And people who look at it now just see it and think “it it’s the best think jag have to offer it’s fucked up beyond recognition”
@@bubsy3861 At the end of the day it was a DOOM clone with an AvP skin on it but playing that alone in a dark room had some serious atmosphere. I honestly don't even remember playing anything else on the Jaguar while I do remember having a lot of fun with the 3DO.
@@Lonespark Well... it’s more like wolf 3D clone than doom. But yea. I can understand that.
Tempest 2k is the system winner for me. Still play it on my original console I've owned since '93.
Brutal sports football was a lot of fun!
I had an friend who owned the Atari Jaguar, and he had these games that I can remember the best: Kasumi Ninja, Doom, Checkered Flag, Cybermorph and Raiden. I thought it was cool console for the time in the 90's. I didn't analyze games and gaming hardware too much when I was younger, it was just about the games.
I expect the Virtual Boy to be next. He should talk about why the thing has a stand. Not because of Nintendo but due to Japanese laws
Japanese laws? I mean that would make sense, though I still don't get why they would panic release it
@@frankiebecchi5307 because it took precious time and resources nintendo wanted to use for the N64, so they forced the dev team to release it downscaled and unfinished as a stopgap until they have released N64
@@csabaweisz8791 thx, learn something new every day
i expect the Memorex VIS (did someone even remember this crap? commodore cdtv overselled it, like, 5 times)
I was alive in the days of the $20 brand spanking new Virtual Boys in the clearance bins at Toys R Us and I STILL regret being too much of a dumb kid to ask for one. At that price point my parents would have ABSOLUTELY gotten me one.
I similarly regret not asking for a Genesis the Christmas after I got my SNES. Deeply. Every Genesis I find at trade shows and retro shops now look like they were dug out of somebody's backyard, and as a kid my weird ass treated my gaming stuff like it was blown glass so it's STILL in damn near mint condition even though I played them CONSTANTLY.
Well. I used to think I was just weird. Now that my younger sister has been diagnosed as autistic at 26 years old we're pretty damn sure I am too. It would certainly explain a lot. lol
Matt, really appreciate the work you put into these videos. Your content is up there with RLM and classic AVGN as the best stuff on TH-cam.
Takes me back to glory days of the wild west that was gaming at the time. What other time could you walk into a music store and see three different versions (at least) of Street Fighter II, each claiming to be the next best thing to the Arcade.
New to this channel, but I'm curious to see if you will cover the NeoGeo MVS, and how Sega with their Dreamcast held a parallel with it in theory.
Where did you learn to fly?
Do the MATH
Are we ever going to get an episode of What Happened to Alone in the Dark (2008)? That game was a lot like Deadly Premonition in that it was an overly ambitious survival horror game that tried to force way too much stuff into it and inevitably fell short of the developers’ aspirations because of budget and time crunch. It had the potential to be so much better, but it suffered from janky controls/mechanics and a bunch of glitches. I honestly really like the game and I can see how great it could’ve been if they took some more time to polish it out it’s flaws. There were a lot of good things that the game had going for it, like the soundtrack, which totally rocks! The music was frickin’ incredible and they did a phenomenal job with the sound design. It would be a perfect game for an episode of What Happened?
I'd love to see an episode on that!
I think an episode would be excellent. Wont lie when you said you liked it though, I genuinely wish I could level with that opinion. Recently been playing it to experience it, and damn I genuinely regret it a bit lol.
@@Mosleyset2 It can definitely be frustrating at times. The shadow monster enemies that kill you if you touch the darkness for example are very annoying. It almost feels like pure luck whether or not you get killed by them. The driving levels are pretty irritating too. One mistake and you’ll end up getting killed and have to restart from the beginning. Hunting down and destroying all the evil roots is pretty boring too. It was clearly just padding to extend the game’s length and it adds nothing to the experience. Despite all that, I still genuinely enjoyed the game and I think that some parts of it were really cool. I especially liked the crafting system for instance, which lets you combine items to make weapons like molotov cocktails, and I already mentioned that the music was really well done. They got a lot of things right, but they also got a lot of things wrong too. The controls were janky and hard to get used to, the driving levels were unnecessarily difficult, and the game was riddled with bugs. I prefer to look at it from an optimistic perspective and focus on the game’s strengths rather than it’s faults, but I understand that’s not easy. If it’s not you’re cup of tea, then I can definitely see why, but personally I think it’s pretty decent. I’d give it like a solid 7/10.
Yeah Alone in the Dark 2008 I played the PS3 port dubbed Inferno and I had a good time with it and if it's development has a story to tell then yeah perfect for the show here for an episode of What Happened.
There was a Uwe Boll movie loosely based on it, right?
Yeah, sorry for the bad memory
Speaking of the Jag, you ought to do a 'Wha Happun' with the infamous Coleco Chameleon, which attempted to use Jag shells. Be an interesting watch :P
That and the Intellivision Amico. Wooo boy, that somehow ended up a even worse trainwreck
@@The_Real_DCT I don't I've ever heard of the Amico. Then again, it's probably for the best :/
Having been a kid during the 90's i was all about the SNES and Mega Drive. Hell i even got a Mega CD, had friends with Game Gears and N64's and eventually saved for a PlayStation with paper round money (and the sold it to get a Saturn because i couldn't afford the games) and the first i ever heard of the Atari Jag was in the 00's, it was so rare here it might as well have not existed!
And where it was? I mean location.
i guess you could say this jaguar was "all bark, no bite"
If a jaguar started barking, I'd be extremely concerned. And confused.
All claw and no scratch my be more appropriate.
All snarl and no scratch.
Man, I was thinking just the other day "I really wish Matt would make a What Happun' on the Jaguar as a whole". Perfect early Christmass gift, my man!
The evolution of Matt's character design is one of my favorite parts of the channel.
Surprised you didn’t mention that spare parts for the Jaguar were used for dental equipment.
Wish to also see either the Virtual Boy or the Gizmondo on this show as well.
Yes we need Sticky Balls to be mentioned at least once on this channel.
One of my greatest regrets was never picking up all the Jaguars and Sega 32x/CDs that were on clearance for 20 bucks back in the day at KB Toys. I guess the only solice I have is that I was under 10 at the time. But it never stopped me from wanting them.
There was a reason they were so cheap. No good games and the CD addons had terrible reliability. Turns out early CD players designed to be cheap console addons really were not built to last.
I remember as a kid wanting to save up for a Jaguar, glad I dodged that bullet.
why, did you brought an other system?
Should look into the troubled history of RoboCop. The first movie almost didn't happen several times. From the Director originally turning it down, to having to completely redo the robot suit, to not being able to work well in the suit, dangerous situations the actors were put in, and so on.
I saw one Jaguar for sale at one game store in the early 1990s. It was sitting in the window display as I walked by. I had no clue what it was at the time beyond a video game system, since I had never heard of it, and to this day I haven't seen another one in the real world.
I just wanted to hop in here and say that I love seeing the dancing Xenomorphs with hats at the intro. I was the sound designer on the Alien Descent VR game.
Which is a whole “What Happened” in and of itself.
I’m from the UK and I remember as a Kid my local store were selling brand new boxed Jaguars for £10! I bought one then got rid of it.
About 15 years later I bought a 2nd hand one for £150! Still have it now.
In hindsight I should love definitely bought all of those Jaguar systems up.
I’m so hype for this one you have no idea
Informative vid as always.
Sadly, the only things that come to my mind in terms of troubled development are videogames, but here's a couple I'd be curious to hear about:
- Wipeout Fusion, which was successful but it would be interesting to hear in more detail how it turned out to be so rough between studio acquisitions, developers infights, and release delays.
- Freedom Wars, which was announced like a groundbreaking monster hunting exclusive for PS Vita but then turned out so messy japanese stores stopped taking used copies within one week.
Btw I don't mean those games I mentioned to be bad, but playing them it does feel like something went wrong at somepoint.
Also, Wipeout Fusion in particular has a nice selection of "heads" Matt could use for the vid thumbnail.
with freedom wars (of all games) getting a remaster in january next year, I'd wanna see what happened with that too. Played it a bit on my vita and it's something unique imo.
Gaming in the 90s was hard but fun
As a gamer who did there homework when Jag released I did the math and found that Nintendo and Sega just had more games I wanted to play and with the PS1/N64 around the corner I knew the Jag was not it then the PS1 dropped with Ridge Racer and Jumping Flash so even the decision to get the Saturn was put on hold I did buy a Saturn well after the PS2 launch though
Is to my understanding finding a Jaguar that works properly these days it's very hard but I think it was like that years ago too
I'm amazed you didn't include Rebecca Heideman saying that the Atari Jaguar was the worst console she'd ever worked on, development-wise
The icon, the legend, the moment herself!
Nothing makes me happier than getting a Wha Happen notification for the Jaguar while watching old Wha Happens
By the time the Jaguar released, Atari was already feeling like an old school gaming company putting out an old school retro console. Many felt that Atari was just going to go with its tried-and-true formula of taking some of their old popular games from the past and just updating them for their new console. The problem with that is that by the time the Jaguar released, those games was already outdated, and most gamers by that time were into more advanced games. Gamers also knew that Atari just wasn't going to be able to compete with the quality of games that was coming out for the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. I remember walking into a toy store at the mall and being excited to see the Atari Jaguar on display in a small section of the store. The games were tiny in comparison to Nintendo and Sega who had a huge selection of games. I was interested to see those 64-bit graphics Atari was bragging about in their commercials. Unfortunately, the game that the store had on display didn't exactly blow me away. In fact, what I saw didn't look too far off from what the Super Nintendo was pushing at the time. Also, that controller was huge and had that old school keypad. That said, Nintendo had first party titles like Mario, Metroid, and Zelda. Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog, Altered Beast, and Streets of Rage. Atari had Pac Man, Tempest, Defender, and Breakout, 🙄. That prospect wasn't exactly bringing excitement to the console lol😂
Nobody needed to do the math to see that this was an inevitable topic for a video
To quote a previous What Happened video: "We have to do something about the Atari Jaguar"
Great video as usual. Would love to see you cover Two Worlds, Mindjack and the Ouya.
Never understood the Cybermorph joke "where did you learnt to fly?", I have the Jag and this game, and first thing I did was learn the controls, if people keep hitting mountains, they're very unskilled players, it's actually very easy to pilot the spaceship in the game.
Watching the vid in full gave me bit of a nostalgia trip, one of my friends had the jaguar and had a few games among them was Alien vs Predator, there were a few other games but that one just stood out to the rest.
Always good to see something acknowledging the jag. My rarest console with a surprisingly wide and active homebrew community.
A few years back I was carousing LetGo and a lady near me had a boxed Jaguar with an extra controller and 4 games...for $65!!!....I messaged her like a stalker trying to get it but she never responded and the listing stayed up like she abandoned the app or something. I wanted that SO bad.
Thank you for the awesome history lesson. This console will always have a special place in my heart.
A friend of mine did some dev work for Jag, he said that due to their janky architecture, only one of the processors would function properly. Tom would do great work, but then Jerry would go do whatever he wanted to do... Usually trying to kill the cat. It made it maddeningly difficult to write good games
There is only one system bus. Tom and Jerry can work well, but when any of them wants to access memory ( the famous 64 bit ) or talk with each other, thing got slow pretty fast. So you could try to cram sound into the 8kB and just pull a midi note per frame / an event for a sound. And you could load a simple mesh into the DSP and rotate it ( the Jaguar cube ) and use the bus only to get the rotation quaternion from the game engine. Then comes the blitter which also uses this bus, often in an inefficient manner. Unlike the DSP or GPU the blitter cannot hold to itself and do some work on its own. It hogs the bus totally unprepared. And then it does some work, then it has to do some internal state machine thingy .. all the while nobody else is allowed to use the 64 bit. DSP and GPU are 32 bit anyway and DSP like 68k (32bit registers) has to got through a 16 bit bottleneck. 48 bits wasted.
Does anybody tech savvy here know if cybermorph has truly unique source code unlike any game or demo before it? I guess what I'm trying to say is is cybermorphs source code unlike anything that came before it?
I had my choice of a Sega CD or a Jaguar for making the honor roll for the year in '95. I went with the Sega CD and never regretted it. Glad I did because I still have my physical copy of my favorite game of all time, Snatcher.
no door because Atari likes it RAWWWW
I bought one of those $99 Jags when I was in the states in '95. Still have it. They were selling off all the games as well. Was awesome! Also picked up that Atari 50th collection for Switch. Wow, it's awesome as well!
I remember buying 2 Jaguars when plus the JagLink & 2 copies of Doom for multiplayer on separate TVs. Worked perfectly and was pretty enjoyable at the time.
Releasing a new console midway through a generation has never gone well
Midway? Never gone well? Sounds about right XD
Minus the Switch, I guess...
They were really like, "All gaming companies can step back while I warm up the Jaaaag."
I have been waiting for this video since I found this series 😭😭😭 I grew up with this dumb system, this was my childhood!
Edit to admit that I have 3 jags, a working cd player and most of the games. Yes, am I bragging.
Damn, you've got me beat. I only have one system and never got the CD add-on.
Nice to see this story on this channel Matt, I remember all the ads in the mags and yeah, we were all taken in by the bit craze.....this was the wake up call lol.
Next, why not cover Atari's competition in the computer market, the Commodore Amiga, from the humble but troubled A1000 to the end with the Amiga CD32. Starting with a machine that became a monster for games, pissed on whatever the IBM PC could do for games in the early 90s, but slowly failed to keep up and fell as time ticked away.
I love post mortems like this. Holding my fingers crossed that you'll tackle Gizmondo someday.
I think Lazy Game Reviews did a video on that one that could suffice for your needs if Matt doesn't go for it. If you've seen it already, apologies!
Fun Fact Matt McMuscles about the Cybermorph pack-in game, the reason it became one was because according to the behind the scene interviews originally the now-infamous Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy game was originally going to be the pack in-game/mascot game to compete with Mario and Sonic back when the Panther/Jaguar consoles where in development respectively, but it fall through at the last minute/eleventh hour when the near final game/final main character Trevor McFur where both shown off to the higher up-executives only to be totally unimpressed with and saying this would not cut it as far as being a pack in-game/mascot game to compete with Mario and Sonic like they had hoped for hence why Cybermorph was chosen in the end. But it all does add-up when you consider the following such as the Sonic the Hedgehog amphomorphic animal mascot fad crazy in the early 90's, but also considering the pack in-game influence being Mario vs Sonic rivalry and given the big cat themes of the Panther/Jaguar console projects and even the associated Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy game and Trevor McFur main character. It sure does make a whole lot of sense after all! But man just imagine what a big disasterus reality the bad rep of the Atari Jaguar console/associated game/main character could have been if the original plan A vision went through which fortunately did not in the end. Heck this would have made the now-infamous Keith Courage in Alpha Zones on the TurboGrafx-16 look like Mario and Sonic, and the Trevor McFur main character could have been almost as big of a laughing stock as Bubsy bobcat which is rather ironic considering both the Trevor McFur main character and Bubsy bobcat both coming out in the same 1993 year an the former (Bubsy) getting his very own Jaguar spin-off game a year later, LOL!
"Where did you learn to fly?"
I'm in New Zealand, and I never saw a Jaguar in my life here. I do remember seeing an ad for it in a friends (UK) gaming magazine in 1996 and thinking 'oh wow that looks cool', the ad made it look like it was on par with a Saturn or something, and I'd only associated Atari with blocky 2600 games prior to this.
Now in the internet era where i've watched multiple video's about it over the years, it's so frustrating watching these consoles/games makers make decisions based on greed, getting things out for sale before they are refined/ready. E.T. and Pacman on Atari 2600 for example. Sega 32X, an unnecessary add on, created BECAUSE of Sega's fear of the Atari jaguar.
I have a soft spot for many of these "failed' consoles. Saturn, Dreamcast, Sega Cd, 32X and also the Jaguar. They all have their hidden gems, and I often feel 'oh what could have been' with them.
Atari Jaguar would’ve been quite popular in Europe due to Atari having a much larger base in Europe from the being a top PC maker at the time.
It’s weird to think, but in the early 90’s Atari was a bigger name in Europe.
Same with C= being bigger in Europe than The States in the early 90’s
Maybe mainland Europe but here in Scotland commodore, Sega, and Nintendo were huge, I only heard of the jaguar in the late 90s so cleary didn't get much exposure here.
"You probably caught the crazy part of that" That Tobey Maguire was in a console commercial? You're damn right I caught that
Funny story. Early in this video I accidentally changed the playback speed to 25% without realizing it, and I thought that the video was deliberately slowing down because Matt was making a point about the Jaguar's poor processing power. I kept watching it like that for 5 minutes before I figured it out.
You know, you say that, and I really hope one of your thoughts was akin to "Wow. Matt either REALLY needs to get some sleep, or lay off the novocaine".
It wasn't so much poor processing as it was giving too much attention to a weaker 68k and a totally lame dev kit. Tom and Jerry were quite powerful chips used in a very poorly thought out system design.
Excellent video! ... I was always curious about the Jag at the time because games were often reviewed in magazines, but there were no Jaguars being sold in my country. I also remember looking at game reviews and thinking "man, this is 64 bit, but they do not look much better than SNES games"
I hope we eventually get a What Happened of Final Fantasy XV, the mess that was that games development is probably really fascinating.
I'd find that interesting as that game had about 8 years of development. This is roughly the same amount of time as Persona 5 (which is a gem) and Final Fantasy 7 Remake (which, like FFXV, is also a discordant mess). Final Fantasy 12 started development not long after Final Fantasy 10's release (so 6-7 years) and it's a great game whose strained development can be seen in places.
Wasn't that like Final Fantasy Versus for the ps3 or something before it became a mainline title?
I want to see one on Final Fantasy XIV. It had a notoriously awful launch and to turn things around they ended up rebuilding the entire thing from the ground up.
3:10
Atari, Potatoes, and Beer.
Quite Nice.
You really have to wonder what kind of games we would've seen if the 3 chips had been fully utilized. Just with the Motorola alone, developers were able to put out games that were comparable to something you'd see on the sega 32x. Maybe some fan project will answer that question some day.
All those good looking games at the end ( or after ) life of the Jaguar use all 3 chips. Fully utilized I would say because homebrew is not even in the same class, yet.
Konix were amazing, I had the Konix Speedking II joystick. I loved the moulded to the hand shape design. It felt completely different to the classic stick on a square base.
This was a fun walk down memory lane. We had a Jaguar when it first came out at our household. While I recall the fighting games (Kasumi Ninja and fucking Dragon: The Bruce Lee story!) not being good... like, at all, it was the first system I got to play DOOM on, so it'll always have a special place in my heart for that. Imagine my surprise when I played it on the computer a couple of years later and heard music! Ha ha!
And Alien vs. Predator was awesome too; still years away from the PC games, that was the best AVP game I could have ever hoped for at the time. That game came with three slip covers for the controller depending on the character you were playing. It was a cool novelty, but I remember it being a pain to get those covers on. Still a great game, regardless.
The Tom and Jerry videos you used are perfect, you're a genius.
McMuscles covering the Atari Jaguar takes me back because you had to live through the 90s to understand "The Bit War".
Thank you, Matt.
A supermarket in town here in England had a bin of Jaguars sat in the middle of the store for months here. I think it may have been '96, but could've been early, but they just sat there for £20 for months and seemingly no one bought any.
That's how poorly received the thing was.
A friend of mine had a Jaguar and let me play this dirt bike game. I remember it graphically looking like a slightly better version of Star Fox and playing twice as slow and very choppy. Knowing what I do about the processors now makes a lot more sense and is borderline infuriating.
I had one at launch, doom, alien, tempest blew me away!
I already knew what happened but gawd damn am I hear to hear Matt explain it.
The final nail in the coffin in the world of Atari .
To be fair... Atari was the final nail in Atari's coffin. So many bad decisions on all their hardware consoles from the XEGS all the way up to the Jaguar. All great hardware with idiots at the helm. It should not surprise anyone since the Tramiels were not fans of gaming.
Don’t forget the Falcon!
Ppl that weren’t around in the 80s don’t understand how big Atari was. Everyone had one. Shit , my grandmother had one.
Any chance we could have a video on the Atari Lynx. Surely it's development from Handy with Epyx to being sold to Atari Corp. Would give it plenty of history to dive into. Plus the games were actually fantastic Atari Games ports, which Atari failed to pay them properly which caused them to not support the Jaguar. Imagine jaguar with stun runner
I love that there were two different Ataris at the time and Atari couldn't even get Atari to support the Atari Jaguar!
The Neo Geo seems like the way you'd market a console like the Jaguar correctly. SNK knew that they couldn't compete with Sega and Nintendo directly, and that their cutting edge console would be too expensive for the average household.
So they made one powerful system that appealed to arcades, as well as the slice of home gamers who would pay anything for the best hardware.
Also didn't hurt that SNK was actually capable of making their own great games.
The funny thing is Jack wasn't lying about the Jaguars power, since if the Homebrewers are to be believed the Jaguar when coded properly could rival the PS1. So essentially had Atari not shot themselves in the foot by providing proper documentation and dev kits the Jaguar may have been a force to be recokoned with during the 5th gen of gaming.
Studios need to develop games, and develop them fast. Whoever at Atari thought they didn't need documentation should have been fired on the spot. Atari was correct in making a powerful system, but you cannot sell a console on power alone.
Powerful Console + games that utilize said power = profit. Do the math.
The idea that the Jaguar is somehow able to run a game like Dino Crisis, Tekken 3 or Final Fantasy 8 at even close to the same level of graphical and audio level quality is uh, not likely.
@@MattMcMuscles Well, not those kind of games but canned projects such as Phear (th-cam.com/video/o457jl9zZbs/w-d-xo.html ) and Konan (th-cam.com/video/b_pSPsqg8V8/w-d-xo.html ) did showed that the Jaguar was more of a robust 3D system but a powerhouse in 2D.
Maybe if they decided to ship it as the first CD-based console too, otherwise it's hard to compete with the first native CD console in terms of making development so much easier
What homebrews would you recommend to check? More in general, what places and channels where one could get a better idea? I knew about the Jaguar enjoying a nice community of dedicated fans to this day (just like the ones who did and still do games for the Dreamcast, or even for the now 40 years old C64) but never really checked closely.
Great video. I got to play some Jaguar games as part of that 50th Anniversary collection that Atari put out. None are what I would call masterpieces, but they were charming and fun enough. Sad to see this was the last hurrah for the great innovator, though.
Even at 15 years old and not having nearly the access to information that we have today I knew the Jaguar wasn't what they were advertising it to be. I also hated those commercials with the snarky teacher.
I also started off with a 2600 and a large number of games, since they were so cheap after the crash I wound up with s bunch of them. I played them alot but honestly the box art was generally more entertaining than the games. Other than Pitfall none of them had any goal to them outside of a high score and all had a very simple gameplay loop. You could see everything they had to offer in about five minutes. When I got an NES some years later it was amazing how much better all the games were. As far as home systems go I think the leap from Atari to Nintendo was the biggest jump. There's a case for the 16 bit to 32bit/PlayStation jump was the biggest, but I'm still going with Nintendo making the biggest leap.
I had TVBoy in the 90s with like 200 atari games prebuilt in. I got bored with it in about an hour, they were just simple 5 minute time wasters (except maybe Adventure.) Nintendo games were on another level.
All I remember about this console is that the commercials were cringe to the point I had zero interest in what they were selling. No other kids I knew owned or wanted one 😅
in conclusion: 32 + 32 ≠ 64
I could watch this video repeatedly just for the extracts of the xj220 title screen/main menu music. Love it!
Ultimately the Atari Jaguar was a great idea and cutting edge piece of hardware ruined by a mix of poor documentation, infamous dev kit bugs which forced developers to either rush games out the door, or work within the framework of the “bridge chip” Motorola 68K instead of the Tom and Jerry chips, and Atari’s financial struggles. I do think had the Jaguar either spent longer in the oven to address these issues, or Atari secured more 3rd party support before rushing to market we might still best case scenario see a Dreamcast like story with the Jaguar because again Atari was in a bad spot financially to begin with.
The Object Processor in Tom is actually the oldest design the Jaguar ( besides the 68k ). The DSP and GPU originally were not supposed to be suited for general purpose. DSP like on the SNES or SID. Weird people work with them and somehow create sound ( PoV probably of the Managers ). Then uh, we need a GPU to do the dirty rasterization and triangle set-up. So another team of nerds with too much math for Managers to understand. Thus the 68k was kept at the helm (working compiler, toolbox for debugging). I mean, DSP and GPU had weird bugs, but at least capable engineers were on board to solve a lot of them in the crunch. JRISC quality is like 10 levels above the rest of the design.
Distribution issues aside, their other big fail was pushing Tempest as if it was some great techno logical achievement or a desirable game.
They should have just ran footage of Alien Vs Predator in every add. The gameplay wasn't that great but the graphics for the time and the Predator visual spectrum changes were stunning.