@@bobbyfagan7760 honestly, just the IDEA of an aliens vs predator game, back in that era, was enough to convince 13 year old me that it was a worthwhile purchase. Again; bullet dodged. Of course it would take another 20 years to get a proper quality AvP game. Better late than never .
My uncle was the first person I knew who owned a Playstation, which he bought around the end of 1995. At the time, I thought it was the 3DO all over again (which he also owned) and that it would be forgotten in a year or two. My expectations were subverted big time.
@@AdhamOhm we have all made mistakes, I thought the jaguar & Saturn were going crush the PlayStation but my dad was like nah, this is the best one u can get
The Jaguar's biggest problem was Jack Tramiel. He was smart, but his shady business practices in the past meant that no retailers or game devs trusted him. No stores would stock the Jaguar without payment terms, and they certainly didn't push it.This is the reason they eventually had to sell through infomercials. The Jaguar was a great system, but unfortunately with Jack running the company, it was never going to succeed. You can only burn so many bridges before you realize that you can't go anywhere.
Jack was way too tight, cutting corners everywhere he could to make a few bucks. 7800 and Lynx conversions from Arcades and other home systems, lacked content as Jack wouldn't allow use of larger cartridges. He had ATD cut content from Cybermorph to get it to fit on a smaller cartridge for later in-pack releases. The industry knew before it launched, the Jaguar was destined for failure under the Tramiel's. And how right they were.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Also in contradiction to cost reduction was use of 68000 and at that 68HC000 that was most expensive 68000 model, initially Jaguar was to have 128 bit data bus and clock at 40MHz was the goal.
Great video and pretty accurate comment; but all that aside, the games delivered were underwhelming, making the system look pretty bad. When the next gen actually rolled in, their software was plentiful and leagues above. The reasons were as above, but to the consumner it just DOA at the time. It couldn't get past the monicer for the Jag CD as "the toilet seat" either :P
He certainly didn't help, but I'm not sure how much of it is on him. The console market was getting to be oversaturated with cheaper systems of similar capabilities, and _someone_ had to come in last.
I owned a Jaguar, although not for very long; I ended up returning it after a month or so. I worked at a mall video game store at that time and could check the release date of upcoming games, and not only were there very few games but the ones in our system were constantly being delayed. I grew up with the 2600 and really wanted the Jaguar to succeed. But sometimes I think us fans wanted it more than the company did.
The design looked to the past. The bug make it look like it was designed by amateurs (fans). I only know IBM PC and C64? There are no famous bugs on the PC. The C64 inherited the broken floppy drive.
@@zikifer my uncle was just like you, he expected Jaguar to bring back the glory days of Atari. I thought the Atari was alright, I enjoyed AVP and tempest was decent. The port of doom was solid but compared to the ps1 it was totally out of its league
I have a jaguar. I didn’t know anything about it being discontinued and bought it when the price dropped to $49.99. I was 18 at the time and that was affordable. Turned out to be barely any games available for it in stores. So I just played the 2 that I got when I bought it. It sat for years in my basement and I just pulled it out a couple of years ago and played it. Glad to see more games have been made for it since then.
Part of the problem was us rural kids. At the nearest kmart/walmart/shopko/prange way/woolworths, you could find sega and nintendo consoles and games and accessories. But jaguar, turbographix, etc, you didnt know anyone that had them, there wasnt a demo unit at your local store, you couldnt rent the games at your local video store, you couldnt borrow games from friends.
Even at big cities you still couldn't find a 3DO or a Jaguar. Most 3DO could only be found near where the VCR or Multimedia Player are, same for the Jaguar. A lot of their games were not shown at retail shelves either cause most people don't buy them and then the store just throw em into the bargain bin a year later.
@@VOANi got my 3do from Best Buy back in 94 and the only other place that sold them around here were Media Play, Babbages, and Electronics Boutique. I think the last two stores were the only place around to get a Jaguar.
@@VOANYes, I remember. I lived in a middle class suburb outside of Philadelphia in the ‘90s and the only place where I saw the 3DO was a Radio Shack with Road Rash on display. The price made it unreasonable for anyone who wanted it. I think I remember seeing Kay-Bee toy store in the mall liquidating the Atari Jaguar and all of its games and accessories for mere dollars around mid 1996. It was a brutal time for any video game maker that wasn’t Nintendo, Sega, or Sony. I don’t think I ever played an Atari Jaguar and the only time I ever played a 3DO was at that Radio Shack.
My dad borrowed a coworkers jaguar with AVP when I was in high school. It was absolutely revolutionary for a very short time. What it could do graphically was spectacular at the time, for a very short time.
Completely agree. That was the one game I bought an Atari Jaguar for. Only game ever that has scared me. Living in the hood with it connected to my 5.1 sound system. That first "Over Here" scared the living be Jesus out of me.
@@kevinmcdowell2679 I dont really live in the "HOOD". But when you live alone and know no one else is in house with you and you hear "over here" so clearly and directional as if someone is standing right behind you maybe a foot away. That is scary.
Okay, you can't say the RAM is both 16 bits and 64 bits wide. The RAM was organized in 64-bit words and Tom's blitter can move 64 bits at a time, but none of the CPUs could operate on 64 bit data. So, it was partially a 64 bit system and partially a 32 bit system. I developed for it and the biggest problem was that it was very hard to predict which programming strategies would result in the fastest code. I remember writing a bunch of benchmark programs just to know how to organize my project.
As John Carmack used to say: "If the Jaguar had dumped the 68K and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony".
@@mwk1He also said the op and blitter wee chips with no theoretical upper limit because their performance was based upon and only limited by the 64bit bus and available memory.
@@mwk1 Issue with Jaguar were hardware bugs and if Panther was never pursued which in end never ever worked to begin with then probably all of those bugs could have been resolved with Tom(GPU) being buggiest, because of that in order to have Blitter working efficiently it had access and use internal SRAM cache of the GPU which itself due to bugs had to use own cache to store code because DRAM controller was bugged. Here is the thing, if 68K was dropped and Jaguar did not have odd motherboard that had cut down corners at front due to design of the shell which compromised real estate just as 68K compromised available DRAM bandwidth along Jerry DSP(CPU). If front corners of motherboard were not cut down and 68K was ditched for final design with Jerry not being compromised by it then even with hardware bugs Jaguar could have been twice as fast compared to what it is. By fact Tom and Jerry could have been clocked to 40 megahertz up from 26.59MHz while latter could have had own 64 bit wide data bus DRAM controller and motherboard would have had enough space to have four more 512 kilobytes 16 bit DRAM chips for total of 4 megabytes and 128bit data bus. Another issue was lets be honest nonsense intentional hardware limit for cartridges that at most could have 6 megabytes, maybe 12 megabytes if bank switching was used.
@@agramartenyields were low. How can that be ? Transistor count is lower than on server processors of the time. I suspect bad dev tools which did not simulate the timing. The ASIC is slapped together from “IP cores”. I say that 28 MHz was already hard. The idea of consumer hardware is to be cheaper than arcade hardware. I don’t know many games which need audio effects beyond Jerry caps to be playable. Maybe music is important for the moot just as much as textures? But why 32 voices? If audiophiles are so hard bent on music, straight from CD audio is more important than I thought. The blitter has a lot of 64 bit registers. The problem is that we cannot write a program to run on it. Atari in their wisdom included a “state machine” to control the blitter. So any faults in the design could not be corrected after production. Otherwise we could probably cook up a loop which does not repeatedly read the same texel, where z-buffer and shading are compilant, and where the blitter would collect 4px inside the destination register even in pixel mode. Ah, maybe the shifter/multiplexer is missing? But 2d blits can multi-register shift! Just make it available as instruction! If the GPU were 64 bit, it could have functioned as an efficient line buffer. Writing to external memory every odd cycle, while the CPU fetches 4 instructions on even cycles.
@@mwk1I don’t see how a dynamic cache helps. The N64 really struggles to utilize it, while Carmack had no problem to slice up the Doom Code into 12 overlays to load into the visible cache once per game loop.
I never owned one, but I was around 23 or 24 when I started seeing the commercials and and product in stores. But I found this video very interesting. I like how you stay focused and the information you present is relevant. I know a lot of TH-camrs inject themselves into these informational kind of videos (like doing voices or skits to add their opinions) and I especially appreciate those that respect my time by staying focused on the information. I stayed to the end so I gave you a like and a subscribe.
The Jaguar didn't fail due to any "hardware" related issue. It failed b/c the people running the company had NO CLUE how to run a video game (or computer) company built around appealing to young consumers. At the time of it's release, the youngest person on the Atari Board of Directors was (IIRC) 64 years old. Most were in their 70's and one was 85. Jack Tramiel himself was in his 70's. They never understood what made Atari great or how to market to young people. The ONLY advice they took from me was to slap a "Made in the USA" label on the Jaguar's box (with American flag.) Not something that young people cared about, but the elderly board totally went for. 🤷♂
Exactly, they didn't know what 64-bit gaming meant, promising titles like Black Ice, White Noise, Dactyl Joust were exactly what the Jaguar needed, never recieved. Who cared if IBM had been awarded the Assembly and Q. A testing of the Jaguar?
@@Cruor34well, the 5200 was a massive failure and i suspect none of it's developers actually played games either. The controllers were the absolute worst ever designed!
Wow. Thank you. I remember my friend telling me he wasn’t getting anymore NES games because he was waiting for the Atari Jaguar and he went on to tell me how it was going to be far superior. I never heard about it again until watching this video; I had assumed my friend made the whole thing up.
The Jaguar’s very brief existence is what happens when you take 70s video game mentality into the mid-90s right before the industry is about to take a massive evolutionary leap.
As a kid I had an Atari 7800 that I loved. It broke unfortunately. My parents got 6 year old me a NES in 1986 and that took over. But when the Jaguar came out in 1993 I was rooting for it so that I could go back to the company that got me into gaming. I also was rooting for it because I like Jaguars... but I was a kid and kids like things for stupid reasons. Now as an adult, and knowing that Atari was a shit "profits above all else" company I'm relieved that they failed. I wish more companies in the gaming industry would fail these days because of putting profits over the product they are producing. Whether it's buggy games, under developed games, hamfisting modern day social politics into the stories, and whatever else it really feels like a lot of the gaming industry has lost its way.
The 1050 was the disc drive, not the computer, which was the Atari 600 and 800xl. The 7800 was not the last game system of the 1980s produced by Atari. That was the XGES. Yep, it was essentially the 800 xl repackaged, but it did have a light gun and Microsoft Flight Simulator. You should do more research when speaking of the Tramiel Atari. Also, the 7800 was originally released in 1984 then shelved until 1986. There was an Atari ST 1040, but it was the ST, not the 8 bit range. That said, a rather entertaining video.
Longer videos are great as long as you're doing in depth ones that haven't been repeated on TH-cam for the last two decades. This video is great and this channel is great, and I welcome longer episodes because of the accuracy and seriousness given to the subject matter. There's no gimmicks, no cheap laugh attempts. It's in depth, accurate and useful knowledge of a subject millions of us love. Keep up the great work.
I bought a Jaguar back in 1994 for only one game, Tempest 2000. Grew up in arcades in the 1980's and Tempest was my favorite. I really never cared for (and still don't), home video game systems but Tempest was and still is the exception. Still have everything including the original boxes. Great video by the way.👍
It was Atari President, Ted Hoff who was behind claims the VR Headset left people feeling sick. He said:"Right now we don't feel the technology is viable for the market. In fact, when I played it, it left me feeling woozy"
The industry moved at light speed during this time period, I remember seeing a Kiosk with AVP and was blown away, myself and friends were still playing the Sega Genesis. The whoa moments came extremely fast though with all the other consoles coming out, remember prior to this the 8-bit / 16-bit were very much the normal.
But I don’t understand why the Jaguar is not even that good at 2d? The first chips came out in the 70s. No magic compression algorithm for the artwork of huge neo geo cartridges. No bullet hell. No translucency. And the superscaler can’t do the fields of Outrun. Sprite rotation with a pixel shader based on a Normal map for shot em ups !
The ST computer technology was not used in proposed consoles such as the Panther, which would of used a 16-Bit CPU and 32-Bit GPU, nor the Jaguar. Project Robin was Rob Zydbel's attempt to pitch the ST hardware inside an XEGS style case and launch it as a budget console, with budget priced games, aging ST conversions of old arcade games like Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Moon Patrol etc. A similar pitch was attempted years later, but using STE hardware.
I sold Jaguars at the game store I worked at. Based on the forum on AOL at the time, all sorts of great things were on the way and I sold systems based on that info. I still feel bad that I was so wrong. I still have mine, and Aliens vs Predator was a fantastic game. It's too bad the guys in charge didn't understand that you need games for a games system. It is nice to know that new games are out now, I'm curious as to how good the general quality of them are.
They should have betted heavily on early 3D games i.e. Doom clones and 3D "sims" like X-Wing. All of that could be ported from PC, and Jaguar was most powerful console for almost 2 years. No other console could realistically run those titles until late 1995 and PS1.
Surprised you didn’t mention that jaguar consoles (or at least the outer plastic shells) were eventually repurposed as dental equipment. Not kidding. I don’t know what it actually did in the context of a dentist office, but there are stills floating around that show what is authoritatively the exact same plastic housing that we know in the world of gaming as the Atari Jaguar.
The only major issue I had with it was when buying used games. Putting the "menu" on the controller rather than the screen wasn't very smart because not only do you have to keep looking down to be sure you are pressing the correct buttons, but if you bought the game used, often the overlay was missing that explained what each button did for that game, making it almost impossible to play. Additionally, as the systems aged, they began to overheat. Mine did just that. But boy did I still love AvP on that system!
It all comes down to two words: killer - app. The bit of software that sells the hardware. Atari thought the console was the selling point, when in fact, it was the games that drove console sales. They didn't have that marquee, signature game that made you want to invest in the hardware. Confusing as to why they didn't understand that dynamic.
My dude, those three games you mentioned in the beginning were not Atari at all. They had ports on the 2600 but Pac-Man was namco, Space Invaders was Taito, and Defender was Williams. Just saying if I were you I would’ve mentioned Pong, Asteroids, Missile Command, and maybe even Centipede.
I was 13 when Jaguar came out. Even as a kid, the thing that blew my mind was that they SAW how popular SF2 and MK were, and they STILL released it with a 3 (functional) button controller. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!? Should have been a 6 button controller with like 3 small buttons in the "dead" space that could have been used as start/pause and 2 other random buttons for any game that wanted to use them. Had it come out with a good controller and a few better games, it might have at least turned a profit for Atari. in 1993-1995 at $250 and offering "the best" version of SF2, Mortal Kombat, and then a few console exclusives to wow your friends like Alien vs Predator maybe it could have held up for a bit.
9:45 While Jack Tramiel had a reputation for cutthroat business practices, he wasn't involved with Atari at the time Activision was formed. At the time Activision began operating, Atari was still wholly owned by Warner, run by Ray Kassar and well after the moment that Nolan Bushnell was fired from his own company. Jack Tramiel entered the Atari picture only after the video game crash, and after Jack Tramiel was, himself, ousted from Commodore.
I used to own a Super Nintendo, and Sega Master System, a Sega Genesis and 32X, an Atari Lynx, and a Nintendo Gameboy, with a decent library of games between them all. I was going to take all of those to the local Babbage's and trade them in for an Atari Jaguar. Main reason, Jaguar could run Doom linked with another Jaguar so that a friend (who did own a Jaguar) and I could deathmatch. The clerk at Babbages advised me to wait for the Sony PlayStation (which was only a couple of months from being released). He explained the features of the PlayStation vs the Jag, and I was sold. So, I traded them all in on credit for an incoming PlayStation. I was not disappointed when I got my PlayStation. Not a second thought given to the Jag.
This is an example of how retailers help sell the Playstation. Sony's policy towards retailers were advantageous to retailers. Sony gave them higher commissions compared to Sega or Nintendo, and most probably even Atari. I heard that Jack Tramel's policies were quite harsh to retailers while he was still head of Commodore, so I would expect similar policies when he took over Atari.
Bad ass video dude! By no means have I watched a bunch of other Atari Jag docs but this was a solid piece! got a thumb smash for sho! Gonna hit the back catalogue too!
My dad bought me an Atari Jaguar console with 2 controllers, multi tap, and TEN games in a bundle for $60 from some overstock catalog when I was a kid in 1996-1997.
I recall when my grandmother passed away in 1994 i brought my Jaguar to my grandparents house and we had around 50 family members there. I recall my more tech savy uncles being blown away at the 3D graphics. It was an impressive piece of Tech in 1994.
This was a wonderfully accurate and thorough coverage of the history of the console and a good enough glimpse into the shenanigans going on at Atari in these days. I always enjoy modern takes on historic game industry news because of what hindsight brings to the discussion. You've done a great job applying that in this report.
I picked up a Jaguar and 3 games over 20 years ago, only ever played it a handful of times. I can recall two of those games, Iron Soldier & Kasumi Ninja. I don't view the system in high regards, considering most of it's best games are available elsewhere and run better. It's still neat that I have one though.
I had a Jaguar and honestly I really liked it. AvP was awesome for the time and Tempest 2000 honestly was fun. I've had almost every system from the 90's at some point and the Jaguar held a special play in my heart.
I still have my jaguar. It had some serious issues with bugs and certain games ran with a horrible ringing noise like playing AvP with all 3 chats suffering from crippling tinnitus
How many other consoles had the molds for their plastic shells repurposed to make the base units for dental cameras? If nothing else of the Jaguar's legacy survives, it will always have that.
I've had one since the $99 prive drop, I still enjoy it from time to time, it was a fun system collecting for in the late 90's mid 2000's when you could go into game shops and pick up the more popular or rare games people traded in for like $10-20. Was able to pick up full boxed copies of Doom, Wolf3D, and AvP for cheap then.
It truly amazes me how there are so many creative people out there that keep making games for these older systems. I wish I had those skills but it seriously impresses me the skills and dedication that so many people have for video games and their systems! I only played the Jaguar once at a local Sears. I had fun but I was a Sega fan boy. I should have purchased it though. Especially seeing as people keep creating games for it even in 2024! That will be one of my many regrets. Like how I should have purchased the brand new NES's that were being sold at Toys R Us for $20 a pop, after the SuperNES had come out.
I remember getting this game system in 1993. My first reaction after playing Trevor Mcfur was, this is definitely not 64 bits. I've never been so disappointed in a game. I really expected that system to have an arcade experience to it. Especially after playing stun runner and hard driving in the arcade. Atari should have ported the arcade games.
Trevor McFur was a first for pre-rendered CGI with 16bpp . Like myst. But why so ugly backgrounds? I would have expected sprites at different depth filling it all up. Not a single background like pcEngine.
I wanted a 3do soo bad!! They had it setup at I forget what store but that racing game was insanity at the time it looked so damn good! But alas I was poor.
Only knew one person who owned one, ONE, in all these years. Always wanted to play AVP on it, but never owned or had access to a Jaguar. Another point is the mold of the Jaguar's case has been used in other industries, including medical. Some X-Ray or something machines you clearly can see the case holding the circuits fo the medical machine. Prob other things as well. Who knew what it could be if it was released a bit later with true 64-bit RISC CPU's and maybe some 10/100 Ethernet port/ USB ports...
Releasing it later on could've been an even bigger disaster for Atari cuz then Sony and Sega would've had the whole entire console gaming market totally cornered by then... They both had like hundreds of new games coming out each year. Just WHERE could they possibly find the room for the Jag to fit in? Two's company but three's a crowd!
I got the Jag for my bday, mainly for the AvP game I read about in a magazine. It was the only game I ever had for the system, but I did play the heck out of it 😅 I also had a T16 with tons of games, still my favorite system. Just something so clean and fun about it.
I loved the Atari Jaguar. NBA Jam was amazing, Doom was awesome, it was revolutionary, it's just unfortunate it didn't get more game development behind it
It wasn't revolutionary. We had Doom on the PC first and it was a much better version than the one on the Jaguar. We also had First Person Shooters and Death matches long before people played Golden Eye on the N64.
We talk about a system that when it failed in greece they giving it practically free by earning 3 coupons in a tv magazine and a measly 3000 drachmas in greek currency in the 90s to empty their filled storages from the unsold systems! Yeah that's how bad it was,a system that when came out i was afraid about the 16bit systems that were at their end! Turns out snes & genesis had a second chance after atari's tragic failure! It's somewhat heart breaking to say those things for the company that started it all in the gaming world but it is the harsh truth!
We had the Jaguar! I think we only had hoverstrike. I miss that thing. I loved how cool the insert card was that went over all those function buttons. I wonder if they make usb controllers for emulation?
EGM was wrong. The Jaguar's two 32-bit chips could execute simultaneously over the 64-bit data bus. The Saturn did not have a 112-bit data bus so the Saturn couldn't be described that way. Since bus width had long been how a system's "bits" were defined, the Jaguar was indeed a 64-bit system, just not an especially powerful one compared to those that came later.
My best memories are that I never owned or played it and had the much better game consoles of the time. I did play a few on emulation later, only to prove myself right about not buying or playing the Atari Jaguar. I didn't know any friends that owned one. To me at the time, it seemed like a waste of money better spent else where. I did have as a child the Atari 2600 I mostly played Pitfall 2 on. About the only game worth playing on it at the time.
@annareismith6843 The best times of my life were never owning or playing an Atari Jaguar. All of my happiest memories are never going anywhere near an Atari Jaguar.
Alien vs Predator scared the cr@p out of me back in the day. No music, just the hum of the station, the screams of the aliens or the clicking of the predators. It was an incredibly atmospheric experience.
I actually really liked my Atari Jaguar. I beat all 3 campaigns in AVP, played the crap out of Tempest 2000, used to play co-op Raiden with my brother and neighbor all the time, still my favorite version of classic Wolfenstein 3D (there was a flamethrower in the Jaguar version) and it also had a solid version of Doom. I agree that the Tramiels and how they did business was probably the main reason for it's failure.
15:03 I swear, I think I saw these things being demo'd at a mall when I was like, 10. Had to pay $5 to try them out. That headset was HEAVY. They didn't put it on properly either so I couldn't see that well. Some kind of first person shooter was plugged in, but the thing ran at like 5 fps. It just sucked in general.
Holy crap. I remember these being advertised as a kid for about 2 weeks. After that the ads were gone and I never saw one or heard it brought up by others. It was like here and vanished in the blink of an eye.
great video... I always wondered what happened, I remember the "do the math" ads which seemed to be around for about 2 months but the ads were all over the place for a blink. I was a Nintendo loyalist back then, I think the absolute awful design of the Playstation controller initially turned me off... but then the games that they started to release... no way to ignore that!
It's crazy to look back on all of these systems I would drool over in magazines as a kid just because of the marketing only to find out as an adult that they were just expensive turds. Thats not to say they didn't have potential but the final product, however it got there, could hardly be considered systems at all.
The multi-processor architecture was very difficult for developers, it made the development of Jaguar games a long and tedious process. To simplify and speed up the development process, a lot of developers only utilized one of the processors which is why most Jaguar games rarely looked any better than Genesis or SNES games. The full capabilities of the Jaguar were rarely achieved or perhaps even never achieved. The difficult programming environment was the main reason it lacked third-party support. The Sega Saturn had the same issue of a difficult programming environment which also caused it to lack third-party support.
What processor do you want to drop? I say 68k . And make the Object Processor a dumb video DMA like Atari ST shifter, but chunky. Leaves us with DSP for sound and GPU for graphics. The idea is that music is independent of the game and runs on DSP. The graphics on the other hand can only be drawn after gamelogic in a gameloop. Yeah, sorry, the pixel shader is idle for half the time. Gotta implement power savings to reduce the heat problems.
Had to watch this. i had a buddy who bought a jaguar when it came out. didnt take long to realize it was lack luster. on the other hand i was an early panasonic 3do owner back then too XD . anyway thank goodness for the PS1
I was so excited for the Jaguar when I first saw previews of it in GamePro magazine back in '93, but those were quickly eclipsed by what I thought then was the much better system, the 3DO. My mother actually bought me a 3DO at the sticker price of $700 for Christmas that year (no idea how she afforded it). I was 14, a dumb kid and didn't really know any better, and certainly didn't have any foresight that both the Jag and the 3DO were destined for obscurity and the scrap heap of history. At that age the magazine ads sold me on the systems and games, as there really was no internet and that was my only source of gaming news.
I remember very well that during those years my intention was to buy a 32X (also the Genesis, that I didn't have either), but after seeing the Jaguar, my intention was to buy that console, then I saw the Sega Saturn and I changed my intention to now buy that console, I even bought a Saturn game before having the console 😅 finally after seeing that FF7 was coming out on PlayStation, I ended up buying that console 🤭 At that time I didn't have money other than to buy just one, so I took my time to buy something 🥴
Out of every console I've ever purchased the Jaguar is the only one that i regret buying and i only paid $50 for it on clearance from Electronics Boutique back in 96 or 97
My dad got one for me Christmas 96 with 10 games and a bunch of other accessories for $60. I had fun with it, but was the least popular kid in my class 😂 😢
I owned one for awhile and ended up selling a couple years later, Tempest 2000 was my favorite game and Doom was a decent port but lacked any music which really removed a big part of the experience, I just remember the buyer texting me later down the road and said they couldn't beat my high score in Tempest 2000 lol.
Yeah, I bought a Jaguar for like $20-30 from KB Toys. It came with Cybermorph and Troy Aikman '95, and something else. I remember asking the clerk if they were sure that was the right price. There were no other games for it though. Even the few games I had were pretty bad and in general it provided little beyond being able to say I had one. Horrible controller.
The 3do was actually developer and publisher friendly. It had the cheapest royalties at $3 per game. It's why every major 3rd party had games for the 3do. Other than the PS1 it was the easiest console to develop for of that generation.
Some of the developers of the AMIGA computer made the 3DO . By the time it got released it would be out of date once the PlayStation and N64 would come out .
14:32 I remember back in the mid 90's having a modem for my PC - a 33.6Kbaud modem that had a dedicated headset port for communicating voice while playing a 2 player game via a direct modem connection. It actually worked OK, and was a lot more fun than typing.
The Jaguar controller actually isn't bad, in some ways it was my favorite part of the console. I think most people who criticize it never used one. The truth is the library just felt really underpowered, even the 32X library is just so obviously "next gen" compared to it. Too many Jaguar games were just exact ports from 16-bit systems or original titles that felt like they could have been on SNES/Genesis. A handful of games like AVP and Tempest 2000 felt as interesting as the stuff on Saturn/PS1 but the number of those that were Jag exclusive was incredibly small.
@@OtomoTenzi totally agree, it just baffles me people bash on the controller, PS1, US Saturn and especially 3DO had just as many controller issues. I have nostalgia for Jaguar but it's "just becaue" nostalgia. There are only like 3 games I enjoy for it that can't be found elsewhere. Compare to Saturn and Dreamcast people consider "failed" where there are something like 200 games I truly love you can't find elsewhere. At least it wasn't wildly overpriced to compound the failure.
The Jaguar (including the CD add-on) only had 60 games, of those 60 games the few that were actually good (Tempest 2000, Rayman, Raiden, AVP, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, NBA Jam, Syndicate, Flashback, Primal Rage, Iron Soldier 1 & 2, etc.) all got ported to other platforms so there was no point in buying a Jaguar. I guess the only two good ones that remain Jaguar exclusives are Atari Kart and Super Burnout (not to be confuse with the Burnout series by Criterion Games) which Atari themselves owned but those were just lame racing games so nobody wants to buy a Jaguar just to play those.
Not only that, it only launch with one game for the first whole month. Many people who bought the 3DO at launch felt like they just got ripoff by that. $700 console and the only game you get is Crash 'n Burn, heck it wasn't even a bundle game either. It almost felt like Trip Hawkins is laughing at them. Those who bought NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, Super NES, Sega Genesis, and Turbo Grafx-16 got games like Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, Sonic the Hedgehog, Altered Beast, Tetris, Super Column, Super Mario Land, Pokemon Yellow, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario All-Stars, or Bonk which came bundle with the console but for 3DO you got nothing with that console.
atari didnt make pacman , namco did , taito created space invaders , the atari ST was a very successful computer in Europe , it was significant because it had midi in an out , it was the main computer in many recording studios .you could do with a bit more research mate
I remember when Tempest 2000 was announced - being made by LLamamsoft and Jeff Minter (a household name in the UK for video games in the 80s), it created a lot of hype - I still think that it's the best game of the "official" launches and the only one that's instantly playable.
Good video, but I think it would have been cool if you had explained at the beginning the difference between the Atari arcade games company and the computer and condole company. A lot of people don't understand this.
With 64-bit processing power, 26.591Mhz of clockspeed, and a cart size capacity of at least 960+ megs; the Jag could've been a REAL GOOD candidate to port arcade and Neo Geo games on... 🤔
960 megabit (120 Megabyte) cartridges would probably have been too expensive to produce in 1993/94. Maybe if they could go as high as 20 Megabytes it would be really good for the system at the time.
Had a friend who had more -money- credit card debt than sense. He made it a point to buy every new console upon release. So I got to play the Jaguar and it was horrible. Only thing worse than the games was the controller. Felt like a small book in your hands. Releasing a console in that day with only 3 main buttons was puzzling; especially after the SNES and the revised Sega Genesis controller.
That was the craziest part to me. They had seen how popular SF2 and MK were and those require 6 and 4 buttons at the very least. 3 buttons even on the Genesis released in 1989 (USA) was very limiting. I wish I could get an answer from someone on what the hell they were thinking.
It should also be noted the Jaguar hardware needed another 2 revisions to iron out all the hardware bugs. Atari never intended the original Jaguar to take on the Playstation and Saturn, that would of been the role of the Jaguar MK II, Jaguar was intended to take on DSP enhanced Sega MD and SNES games, 3DO,CD32 and CDi
The problem with the revision is that other companies did not sleep. I feel like energy was wasted on unimportant features. Why not stick to 16 bit cartridges? Why invent and adjust an object format when you have a GPU to control the blitter or videoDMA? Why are there scalar instructions which only exist because branches are too slow. Saturate is only needed once per pixel on Jpeg decompression. Likewise Absolute is only used once in 3d maths. Non-power of two frame buffers / textures? 5 bit conditions for jumps, but no overflow detection. MAC overflow.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldtThat was exactly the issue Atari faced with the Jaguar, they couldn't afford further delays, whilst hardware was further revised and bugs ironed out, as they knew Sega, Sony and Nintendo all had newer, far more powerful being worked on in their R+D labs. Leonard Tramiel refusing to accept the hardware had issues didn't help, nor putting pressure on developers like Imagitec Design etc to texture map 3D titles, to be seen as being able compete with the 3DO in this area.
30 Years later and the Atari Jaguar still stirs many strong opinions when it's brought up. Amazing isn't it? @thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Yes, the Jaguar wasn't intended to take on the Playstation and Saturn. But doesn't the CoJag make you wonder if it *could have* if they would have, if they had gone with more aggressive hardware? Personally that question still drives me crazy, 30 years later.
@@Offramp-z7pEven if they had just taken some of the key features from the lower end CoJag hardware:Using a 25 MHz Motorola 68020... 4 megabytes of RAM, the system could of been really something. I was also very surprised they allowed the awful spaghetti A. I code Jane Whittaker ran on the 68000 for AVP, which literally crippled the games frame rate. An even larger cartridge for that game would of allowed for the planned full orchestral score. But no everything was done on the bloody cheap.
I mostly played just the GameBoy Color, and the GBA during this era. I did not like the Nintendo 64 or PS1 during that time. But when the PS2 became affordable, I slowly returned to Console Gaming..
I got a Jaguar in 1994 with most of its best games. For a time it was the defacto place for hardcore FPS games on console. AVP was the stuff of legends especially in 1994. Nothing looked or played like it anywhere else in the console world. It still has the very best versions of Wolfenstein 3D and NBA Jams ever.
18:45 Those systems aren't the original systems, they're the new "plus" systems. When you're referencing the modern systems and you say "2600" instead of "2600+," you're off by about 47 years.
![[BRB Talk] The Lemon Twigs, Hallway Incident at Magfest](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GBrvl92_uBo/mqdefault.jpg)
I remember asking my dad for a jaguar & he got me a PlayStation instead.
Probably the best decision he made
Bullet dodged.
@ 🙏
@@bobbyfagan7760 honestly, just the IDEA of an aliens vs predator game, back in that era, was enough to convince 13 year old me that it was a worthwhile purchase. Again; bullet dodged. Of course it would take another 20 years to get a proper quality AvP game. Better late than never .
My uncle was the first person I knew who owned a Playstation, which he bought around the end of 1995. At the time, I thought it was the 3DO all over again (which he also owned) and that it would be forgotten in a year or two.
My expectations were subverted big time.
@@AdhamOhm we have all made mistakes, I thought the jaguar & Saturn were going crush the PlayStation but my dad was like nah, this is the best one u can get
The Jaguar's biggest problem was Jack Tramiel. He was smart, but his shady business practices in the past meant that no retailers or game devs trusted him. No stores would stock the Jaguar without payment terms, and they certainly didn't push it.This is the reason they eventually had to sell through infomercials. The Jaguar was a great system, but unfortunately with Jack running the company, it was never going to succeed. You can only burn so many bridges before you realize that you can't go anywhere.
Jack was way too tight, cutting corners everywhere he could to make a few bucks.
7800 and Lynx conversions from Arcades and other home systems, lacked content as Jack wouldn't allow use of larger cartridges.
He had ATD cut content from Cybermorph to get it to fit on a smaller cartridge for later in-pack releases.
The industry knew before it launched, the Jaguar was destined for failure under the Tramiel's.
And how right they were.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Also in contradiction to cost reduction was use of 68000 and at that 68HC000 that was most expensive 68000 model, initially Jaguar was to have 128 bit data bus and clock at 40MHz was the goal.
Great video and pretty accurate comment; but all that aside, the games delivered were underwhelming, making the system look pretty bad. When the next gen actually rolled in, their software was plentiful and leagues above. The reasons were as above, but to the consumner it just DOA at the time. It couldn't get past the monicer for the Jag CD as "the toilet seat" either :P
He certainly didn't help, but I'm not sure how much of it is on him. The console market was getting to be oversaturated with cheaper systems of similar capabilities, and _someone_ had to come in last.
What dodgy stuff did Jack Tramiel do to ruin his reputation with dealers?
I owned a Jaguar, although not for very long; I ended up returning it after a month or so. I worked at a mall video game store at that time and could check the release date of upcoming games, and not only were there very few games but the ones in our system were constantly being delayed.
I grew up with the 2600 and really wanted the Jaguar to succeed. But sometimes I think us fans wanted it more than the company did.
The design looked to the past. The bug make it look like it was designed by amateurs (fans). I only know IBM PC and C64? There are no famous bugs on the PC. The C64 inherited the broken floppy drive.
@@zikifer my uncle was just like you, he expected Jaguar to bring back the glory days of Atari. I thought the Atari was alright, I enjoyed AVP and tempest was decent. The port of doom was solid but compared to the ps1 it was totally out of its league
I have a jaguar. I didn’t know anything about it being discontinued and bought it when the price dropped to $49.99. I was 18 at the time and that was affordable. Turned out to be barely any games available for it in stores. So I just played the 2 that I got when I bought it. It sat for years in my basement and I just pulled it out a couple of years ago and played it. Glad to see more games have been made for it since then.
Part of the problem was us rural kids. At the nearest kmart/walmart/shopko/prange way/woolworths, you could find sega and nintendo consoles and games and accessories. But jaguar, turbographix, etc, you didnt know anyone that had them, there wasnt a demo unit at your local store, you couldnt rent the games at your local video store, you couldnt borrow games from friends.
Bingo. I grew up in a rural town and can attest to this.
Even at big cities you still couldn't find a 3DO or a Jaguar. Most 3DO could only be found near where the VCR or Multimedia Player are, same for the Jaguar. A lot of their games were not shown at retail shelves either cause most people don't buy them and then the store just throw em into the bargain bin a year later.
@@VOANi got my 3do from Best Buy back in 94 and the only other place that sold them around here were Media Play, Babbages, and Electronics Boutique. I think the last two stores were the only place around to get a Jaguar.
@@VOANYes, I remember. I lived in a middle class suburb outside of Philadelphia in the ‘90s and the only place where I saw the 3DO was a Radio Shack with Road Rash on display. The price made it unreasonable for anyone who wanted it. I think I remember seeing Kay-Bee toy store in the mall liquidating the Atari Jaguar and all of its games and accessories for mere dollars around mid 1996. It was a brutal time for any video game maker that wasn’t Nintendo, Sega, or Sony. I don’t think I ever played an Atari Jaguar and the only time I ever played a 3DO was at that Radio Shack.
My dad borrowed a coworkers jaguar with AVP when I was in high school. It was absolutely revolutionary for a very short time. What it could do graphically was spectacular at the time, for a very short time.
Completely agree. That was the one game I bought an Atari Jaguar for. Only game ever that has scared me. Living in the hood with it connected to my 5.1 sound system. That first "Over Here" scared the living be Jesus out of me.
AvP was so much fun when mine worked. I loved it because it was versatile and you could play all three sides.
@@kybble I agree, if I had a Jaguar and I lived in the hood, I'd be scared too, of gettin robbed.
@@kevinmcdowell2679 I dont really live in the "HOOD". But when you live alone and know no one else is in house with you and you hear "over here" so clearly and directional as if someone is standing right behind you maybe a foot away. That is scary.
@kybble yeah, that would freak me out regardless of where I lived.
Okay, you can't say the RAM is both 16 bits and 64 bits wide. The RAM was organized in 64-bit words and Tom's blitter can move 64 bits at a time, but none of the CPUs could operate on 64 bit data. So, it was partially a 64 bit system and partially a 32 bit system. I developed for it and the biggest problem was that it was very hard to predict which programming strategies would result in the fastest code. I remember writing a bunch of benchmark programs just to know how to organize my project.
As John Carmack used to say: "If the Jaguar had dumped the 68K and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony".
@@mwk1He also said the op and blitter wee chips with no theoretical upper limit because their performance was based upon and only limited by the 64bit bus and available memory.
@@mwk1 Issue with Jaguar were hardware bugs and if Panther was never pursued which in end never ever worked to begin with then probably all of those bugs could have been resolved with Tom(GPU) being buggiest, because of that in order to have Blitter working efficiently it had access and use internal SRAM cache of the GPU which itself due to bugs had to use own cache to store code because DRAM controller was bugged.
Here is the thing, if 68K was dropped and Jaguar did not have odd motherboard that had cut down corners at front due to design of the shell which compromised real estate just as 68K compromised available DRAM bandwidth along Jerry DSP(CPU). If front corners of motherboard were not cut down and 68K was ditched for final design with Jerry not being compromised by it then even with hardware bugs Jaguar could have been twice as fast compared to what it is.
By fact Tom and Jerry could have been clocked to 40 megahertz up from 26.59MHz while latter could have had own 64 bit wide data bus DRAM controller and motherboard would have had enough space to have four more 512 kilobytes 16 bit DRAM chips for total of 4 megabytes and 128bit data bus. Another issue was lets be honest nonsense intentional hardware limit for cartridges that at most could have 6 megabytes, maybe 12 megabytes if bank switching was used.
@@agramartenyields were low. How can that be ? Transistor count is lower than on server processors of the time. I suspect bad dev tools which did not simulate the timing. The ASIC is slapped together from “IP cores”. I say that 28 MHz was already hard.
The idea of consumer hardware is to be cheaper than arcade hardware. I don’t know many games which need audio effects beyond Jerry caps to be playable. Maybe music is important for the moot just as much as textures? But why 32 voices? If audiophiles are so hard bent on music, straight from CD audio is more important than I thought.
The blitter has a lot of 64 bit registers. The problem is that we cannot write a program to run on it. Atari in their wisdom included a “state machine” to control the blitter. So any faults in the design could not be corrected after production. Otherwise we could probably cook up a loop which does not repeatedly read the same texel, where z-buffer and shading are compilant, and where the blitter would collect 4px inside the destination register even in pixel mode. Ah, maybe the shifter/multiplexer is missing? But 2d blits can multi-register shift! Just make it available as instruction!
If the GPU were 64 bit, it could have functioned as an efficient line buffer. Writing to external memory every odd cycle, while the CPU fetches 4 instructions on even cycles.
@@mwk1I don’t see how a dynamic cache helps. The N64 really struggles to utilize it, while Carmack had no problem to slice up the Doom Code into 12 overlays to load into the visible cache once per game loop.
I never owned one, but I was around 23 or 24 when I started seeing the commercials and and product in stores. But I found this video very interesting. I like how you stay focused and the information you present is relevant. I know a lot of TH-camrs inject themselves into these informational kind of videos (like doing voices or skits to add their opinions) and I especially appreciate those that respect my time by staying focused on the information. I stayed to the end so I gave you a like and a subscribe.
My guy I've seen at least 4 retrospectives of the jaguar over the years and this is def the best one I've seen. I really appreciate it!
The Jaguar didn't fail due to any "hardware" related issue. It failed b/c the people running the company had NO CLUE how to run a video game (or computer) company built around appealing to young consumers.
At the time of it's release, the youngest person on the Atari Board of Directors was (IIRC) 64 years old. Most were in their 70's and one was 85. Jack Tramiel himself was in his 70's. They never understood what made Atari great or how to market to young people.
The ONLY advice they took from me was to slap a "Made in the USA" label on the Jaguar's box (with American flag.) Not something that young people cared about, but the elderly board totally went for.
🤷♂
Exactly, they didn't know what 64-bit gaming meant, promising titles like Black Ice, White Noise, Dactyl Joust were exactly what the Jaguar needed, never recieved.
Who cared if IBM had been awarded the Assembly and Q. A testing of the Jaguar?
It failed because it's an Atari
thats a great point.
Any idea who came up with the idiotic giant 3 button controller? SOMEONE on the design team had to play video games.
@@Cruor34well, the 5200 was a massive failure and i suspect none of it's developers actually played games either. The controllers were the absolute worst ever designed!
Wow. Thank you. I remember my friend telling me he wasn’t getting anymore NES games because he was waiting for the Atari Jaguar and he went on to tell me how it was going to be far superior. I never heard about it again until watching this video; I had assumed my friend made the whole thing up.
The Jaguar’s very brief existence is what happens when you take 70s video game mentality into the mid-90s right before the industry is about to take a massive evolutionary leap.
As a kid I had an Atari 7800 that I loved. It broke unfortunately. My parents got 6 year old me a NES in 1986 and that took over. But when the Jaguar came out in 1993 I was rooting for it so that I could go back to the company that got me into gaming. I also was rooting for it because I like Jaguars... but I was a kid and kids like things for stupid reasons.
Now as an adult, and knowing that Atari was a shit "profits above all else" company I'm relieved that they failed. I wish more companies in the gaming industry would fail these days because of putting profits over the product they are producing. Whether it's buggy games, under developed games, hamfisting modern day social politics into the stories, and whatever else it really feels like a lot of the gaming industry has lost its way.
The 1050 was the disc drive, not the computer, which was the Atari 600 and 800xl. The 7800 was not the last game system of the 1980s produced by Atari. That was the XGES. Yep, it was essentially the 800 xl repackaged, but it did have a light gun and Microsoft Flight Simulator. You should do more research when speaking of the Tramiel Atari. Also, the 7800 was originally released in 1984 then shelved until 1986. There was an Atari ST 1040, but it was the ST, not the 8 bit range. That said, a rather entertaining video.
Longer videos are great as long as you're doing in depth ones that haven't been repeated on TH-cam for the last two decades. This video is great and this channel is great, and I welcome longer episodes because of the accuracy and seriousness given to the subject matter. There's no gimmicks, no cheap laugh attempts. It's in depth, accurate and useful knowledge of a subject millions of us love. Keep up the great work.
I bought a Jaguar back in 1994 for only one game, Tempest 2000. Grew up in arcades in the 1980's and Tempest was my favorite. I really never cared for (and still don't), home video game systems but Tempest was and still is the exception. Still have everything including the original boxes. Great video by the way.👍
It was Atari President, Ted Hoff who was behind claims the VR Headset left people feeling sick.
He said:"Right now we don't feel the technology is viable for the market. In fact, when I played it, it left me feeling woozy"
The industry moved at light speed during this time period, I remember seeing a Kiosk with AVP and was blown away, myself and friends were still playing the Sega Genesis. The whoa moments came extremely fast though with all the other consoles coming out, remember prior to this the 8-bit / 16-bit were very much the normal.
But I don’t understand why the Jaguar is not even that good at 2d? The first chips came out in the 70s. No magic compression algorithm for the artwork of huge neo geo cartridges. No bullet hell. No translucency. And the superscaler can’t do the fields of Outrun. Sprite rotation with a pixel shader based on a Normal map for shot em ups !
The ST computer technology was not used in proposed consoles such as the Panther, which would of used a 16-Bit CPU and 32-Bit GPU, nor the Jaguar.
Project Robin was Rob Zydbel's attempt to pitch the ST hardware inside an XEGS style case and launch it as a budget console, with budget priced games, aging ST conversions of old arcade games like Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Moon Patrol etc.
A similar pitch was attempted years later, but using STE hardware.
I sold Jaguars at the game store I worked at. Based on the forum on AOL at the time, all sorts of great things were on the way and I sold systems based on that info. I still feel bad that I was so wrong. I still have mine, and Aliens vs Predator was a fantastic game. It's too bad the guys in charge didn't understand that you need games for a games system. It is nice to know that new games are out now, I'm curious as to how good the general quality of them are.
They should have betted heavily on early 3D games i.e. Doom clones and 3D "sims" like X-Wing. All of that could be ported from PC, and Jaguar was most powerful console for almost 2 years. No other console could realistically run those titles until late 1995 and PS1.
Surprised you didn’t mention that jaguar consoles (or at least the outer plastic shells) were eventually repurposed as dental equipment. Not kidding. I don’t know what it actually did in the context of a dentist office, but there are stills floating around that show what is authoritatively the exact same plastic housing that we know in the world of gaming as the Atari Jaguar.
The only major issue I had with it was when buying used games. Putting the "menu" on the controller rather than the screen wasn't very smart because not only do you have to keep looking down to be sure you are pressing the correct buttons, but if you bought the game used, often the overlay was missing that explained what each button did for that game, making it almost impossible to play. Additionally, as the systems aged, they began to overheat. Mine did just that. But boy did I still love AvP on that system!
Had a Jaguar and never was a fan of it.
Honestly, I loved my Lynx.
Haha the Lynx was awesome. Released the same year as the game boy and IIRC 2 years ahead of the game gear. I loved mine!
The lynx had such a great set of developer documentation. It was half useful technical info and half the author waxing about life.
It all comes down to two words: killer - app. The bit of software that sells the hardware. Atari thought the console was the selling point, when in fact, it was the games that drove console sales. They didn't have that marquee, signature game that made you want to invest in the hardware. Confusing as to why they didn't understand that dynamic.
My dude, those three games you mentioned in the beginning were not Atari at all. They had ports on the 2600 but Pac-Man was namco, Space Invaders was Taito, and Defender was Williams. Just saying if I were you I would’ve mentioned Pong, Asteroids, Missile Command, and maybe even Centipede.
Thank you - that was driving me nuts.
Was going to say the same
Its some kind of AI so info is all mostly wrong anyway
I still liked and subbed
Pac man was one of the mistakes
This is an excellent deep dive into the system. Well done.
I was 13 when Jaguar came out. Even as a kid, the thing that blew my mind was that they SAW how popular SF2 and MK were, and they STILL released it with a 3 (functional) button controller. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!? Should have been a 6 button controller with like 3 small buttons in the "dead" space that could have been used as start/pause and 2 other random buttons for any game that wanted to use them. Had it come out with a good controller and a few better games, it might have at least turned a profit for Atari. in 1993-1995 at $250 and offering "the best" version of SF2, Mortal Kombat, and then a few console exclusives to wow your friends like Alien vs Predator maybe it could have held up for a bit.
Like I said, controllers are always replaceable/interchangeable... Not having enough games to win your customers over is ANOTHER THING.
9:45
While Jack Tramiel had a reputation for cutthroat business practices, he wasn't involved with Atari at the time Activision was formed.
At the time Activision began operating, Atari was still wholly owned by Warner, run by Ray Kassar and well after the moment that Nolan Bushnell was fired from his own company.
Jack Tramiel entered the Atari picture only after the video game crash, and after Jack Tramiel was, himself, ousted from Commodore.
I used to own a Super Nintendo, and Sega Master System, a Sega Genesis and 32X, an Atari Lynx, and a Nintendo Gameboy, with a decent library of games between them all. I was going to take all of those to the local Babbage's and trade them in for an Atari Jaguar. Main reason, Jaguar could run Doom linked with another Jaguar so that a friend (who did own a Jaguar) and I could deathmatch. The clerk at Babbages advised me to wait for the Sony PlayStation (which was only a couple of months from being released). He explained the features of the PlayStation vs the Jag, and I was sold. So, I traded them all in on credit for an incoming PlayStation. I was not disappointed when I got my PlayStation. Not a second thought given to the Jag.
This is an example of how retailers help sell the Playstation. Sony's policy towards retailers were advantageous to retailers. Sony gave them higher commissions compared to Sega or Nintendo, and most probably even Atari. I heard that Jack Tramel's policies were quite harsh to retailers while he was still head of Commodore, so I would expect similar policies when he took over Atari.
@@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952 Yeah....Atari leadership at that time was pretty horrendous, wasn't it?
And now you probably don't have the Playstation and wish you had your traded in systems?
@@ToddHartung-pp2hp I did get the PlayStation after trading in my systems, and it was a great decision. Totally passed on the Jaguar with no regrets.
Bad ass video dude! By no means have I watched a bunch of other Atari Jag docs but this was a solid piece! got a thumb smash for sho! Gonna hit the back catalogue too!
My dad bought me an Atari Jaguar console with 2 controllers, multi tap, and TEN games in a bundle for $60 from some overstock catalog when I was a kid in 1996-1997.
I recall when my grandmother passed away in 1994 i brought my Jaguar to my grandparents house and we had around 50 family members there. I recall my more tech savy uncles being blown away at the 3D graphics. It was an impressive piece of Tech in 1994.
This was a wonderfully accurate and thorough coverage of the history of the console and a good enough glimpse into the shenanigans going on at Atari in these days. I always enjoy modern takes on historic game industry news because of what hindsight brings to the discussion. You've done a great job applying that in this report.
I picked up a Jaguar and 3 games over 20 years ago, only ever played it a handful of times. I can recall two of those games, Iron Soldier & Kasumi Ninja. I don't view the system in high regards, considering most of it's best games are available elsewhere and run better. It's still neat that I have one though.
For the Tramiel family wanting to cut corners so bad to save money, they sure did waste a lot of it.
I had a Jaguar and honestly I really liked it. AvP was awesome for the time and Tempest 2000 honestly was fun. I've had almost every system from the 90's at some point and the Jaguar held a special play in my heart.
I still have my jaguar. It had some serious issues with bugs and certain games ran with a horrible ringing noise like playing AvP with all 3 chats suffering from crippling tinnitus
How many other consoles had the molds for their plastic shells repurposed to make the base units for dental cameras? If nothing else of the Jaguar's legacy survives, it will always have that.
I've had one since the $99 prive drop, I still enjoy it from time to time, it was a fun system collecting for in the late 90's mid 2000's when you could go into game shops and pick up the more popular or rare games people traded in for like $10-20. Was able to pick up full boxed copies of Doom, Wolf3D, and AvP for cheap then.
I still have mine too, but I get the Red Screen of Death on every game. I tried to clean the contacts and what not but to no avail.
Good job, I watched the whole thing, subbed, you should do more of this.
You had some errors, you should get yourself a technical editor.
So anxious for a JAGUAR CLASSIC MINI console with the best Jaguar/CD games.
It truly amazes me how there are so many creative people out there that keep making games for these older systems. I wish I had those skills but it seriously impresses me the skills and dedication that so many people have for video games and their systems! I only played the Jaguar once at a local Sears. I had fun but I was a Sega fan boy. I should have purchased it though. Especially seeing as people keep creating games for it even in 2024! That will be one of my many regrets. Like how I should have purchased the brand new NES's that were being sold at Toys R Us for $20 a pop, after the SuperNES had come out.
alien vs predator was the shit
I remember getting this game system in 1993. My first reaction after playing Trevor Mcfur was, this is definitely not 64 bits. I've never been so disappointed in a game. I really expected that system to have an arcade experience to it. Especially after playing stun runner and hard driving in the arcade. Atari should have ported the arcade games.
Trevor McFur was a first for pre-rendered CGI with 16bpp . Like myst. But why so ugly backgrounds? I would have expected sprites at different depth filling it all up. Not a single background like pcEngine.
I wanted a 3do soo bad!! They had it setup at I forget what store but that racing game was insanity at the time it looked so damn good! But alas I was poor.
Only knew one person who owned one, ONE, in all these years. Always wanted to play AVP on it, but never owned or had access to a Jaguar. Another point is the mold of the Jaguar's case has been used in other industries, including medical. Some X-Ray or something machines you clearly can see the case holding the circuits fo the medical machine. Prob other things as well. Who knew what it could be if it was released a bit later with true 64-bit RISC CPU's and maybe some 10/100 Ethernet port/ USB ports...
Releasing it later on could've been an even bigger disaster for Atari cuz then Sony and Sega would've had the whole entire console gaming market totally cornered by then... They both had like hundreds of new games coming out each year. Just WHERE could they possibly find the room for the Jag to fit in? Two's company but three's a crowd!
I got the Jag for my bday, mainly for the AvP game I read about in a magazine. It was the only game I ever had for the system, but I did play the heck out of it 😅
I also had a T16 with tons of games, still my favorite system. Just something so clean and fun about it.
keep it up the good work, amazing video!
I loved the Atari Jaguar. NBA Jam was amazing, Doom was awesome, it was revolutionary, it's just unfortunate it didn't get more game development behind it
It wasn't revolutionary. We had Doom on the PC first and it was a much better version than the one on the Jaguar. We also had First Person Shooters and Death matches long before people played Golden Eye on the N64.
We talk about a system that when it failed in greece they giving it practically free by earning 3 coupons in a tv magazine and a measly 3000 drachmas in greek currency in the 90s to empty their filled storages from the unsold systems! Yeah that's how bad it was,a system that when came out i was afraid about the 16bit systems that were at their end! Turns out snes & genesis had a second chance after atari's tragic failure! It's somewhat heart breaking to say those things for the company that started it all in the gaming world but it is the harsh truth!
Great video! Please make more like this!
Great content. Subscribed. 😊
We had the Jaguar! I think we only had hoverstrike. I miss that thing. I loved how cool the insert card was that went over all those function buttons. I wonder if they make usb controllers for emulation?
EGM was wrong. The Jaguar's two 32-bit chips could execute simultaneously over the 64-bit data bus. The Saturn did not have a 112-bit data bus so the Saturn couldn't be described that way. Since bus width had long been how a system's "bits" were defined, the Jaguar was indeed a 64-bit system, just not an especially powerful one compared to those that came later.
No, the 32-bit chips needed to take turns. After all there is only one address bus . What you describe is the PS1 with GSRAM and SDRAM each 32 bit.
My best memories are that I never owned or played it and had the much better game consoles of the time. I did play a few on emulation later, only to prove myself right about not buying or playing the Atari Jaguar. I didn't know any friends that owned one. To me at the time, it seemed like a waste of money better spent else where. I did have as a child the Atari 2600 I mostly played Pitfall 2 on. About the only game worth playing on it at the time.
@annareismith6843 The best times of my life were never owning or playing an Atari Jaguar. All of my happiest memories are never going anywhere near an Atari Jaguar.
Alien vs Predator scared the cr@p out of me back in the day. No music, just the hum of the station, the screams of the aliens or the clicking of the predators. It was an incredibly atmospheric experience.
Imagine stocking up on $30 Jaguar consoles, waiting 30 years, then selling them for $550 a piece.
Storage costs...
I still have my Jag and Jag CD boxed. Tempted to let them go.
I got one of those $30 systems from KB toy store
with inflation you'd still lose money.
@@TheLifesentence2278 you’d make slightly less money
I actually really liked my Atari Jaguar. I beat all 3 campaigns in AVP, played the crap out of Tempest 2000, used to play co-op Raiden with my brother and neighbor all the time, still my favorite version of classic Wolfenstein 3D (there was a flamethrower in the Jaguar version) and it also had a solid version of Doom. I agree that the Tramiels and how they did business was probably the main reason for it's failure.
15:03 I swear, I think I saw these things being demo'd at a mall when I was like, 10. Had to pay $5 to try them out. That headset was HEAVY. They didn't put it on properly either so I couldn't see that well. Some kind of first person shooter was plugged in, but the thing ran at like 5 fps. It just sucked in general.
Right out of the gate OP leads with misinformation. Thank you for immediately informing me to skip this video without wasting any more of my time.
I still want one. I love the design.
Great video! First of yours I've seen. I subscribed
I bought the Jaguar in 95. I don't know why i held out hope for that system. In retrospect, it was a joke.
The cadence of this history guy isn't bad at all
Holy crap. I remember these being advertised as a kid for about 2 weeks. After that the ads were gone and I never saw one or heard it brought up by others. It was like here and vanished in the blink of an eye.
great video... I always wondered what happened, I remember the "do the math" ads which seemed to be around for about 2 months but the ads were all over the place for a blink. I was a Nintendo loyalist back then, I think the absolute awful design of the Playstation controller initially turned me off... but then the games that they started to release... no way to ignore that!
It's crazy to look back on all of these systems I would drool over in magazines as a kid just because of the marketing only to find out as an adult that they were just expensive turds. Thats not to say they didn't have potential but the final product, however it got there, could hardly be considered systems at all.
The multi-processor architecture was very difficult for developers, it made the development of Jaguar games a long and tedious process. To simplify and speed up the development process, a lot of developers only utilized one of the processors which is why most Jaguar games rarely looked any better than Genesis or SNES games. The full capabilities of the Jaguar were rarely achieved or perhaps even never achieved. The difficult programming environment was the main reason it lacked third-party support. The Sega Saturn had the same issue of a difficult programming environment which also caused it to lack third-party support.
What processor do you want to drop? I say 68k . And make the Object Processor a dumb video DMA like Atari ST shifter, but chunky. Leaves us with DSP for sound and GPU for graphics. The idea is that music is independent of the game and runs on DSP. The graphics on the other hand can only be drawn after gamelogic in a gameloop. Yeah, sorry, the pixel shader is idle for half the time. Gotta implement power savings to reduce the heat problems.
@9:52
I wanna know more about "Huggy, the wireless puppet" 😂😂😂
To me, the most interesting thing about the Jaguar is that it’s housing is also used in some dental equipment, according to AVGN.
Had to watch this. i had a buddy who bought a jaguar when it came out. didnt take long to realize it was lack luster. on the other hand i was an early panasonic 3do owner back then too XD . anyway thank goodness for the PS1
Jack Tramiel's last name is pronounced "Truh-MEL".
I was so excited for the Jaguar when I first saw previews of it in GamePro magazine back in '93, but those were quickly eclipsed by what I thought then was the much better system, the 3DO. My mother actually bought me a 3DO at the sticker price of $700 for Christmas that year (no idea how she afforded it). I was 14, a dumb kid and didn't really know any better, and certainly didn't have any foresight that both the Jag and the 3DO were destined for obscurity and the scrap heap of history. At that age the magazine ads sold me on the systems and games, as there really was no internet and that was my only source of gaming news.
I remember very well that during those years my intention was to buy a 32X (also the Genesis, that I didn't have either), but after seeing the Jaguar, my intention was to buy that console, then I saw the Sega Saturn and I changed my intention to now buy that console, I even bought a Saturn game before having the console 😅 finally after seeing that FF7 was coming out on PlayStation, I ended up buying that console 🤭 At that time I didn't have money other than to buy just one, so I took my time to buy something 🥴
Out of every console I've ever purchased the Jaguar is the only one that i regret buying and i only paid $50 for it on clearance from Electronics Boutique back in 96 or 97
My dad got one for me Christmas 96 with 10 games and a bunch of other accessories for $60. I had fun with it, but was the least popular kid in my class 😂 😢
I owned one for awhile and ended up selling a couple years later, Tempest 2000 was my favorite game and Doom was a decent port but lacked any music which really removed a big part of the experience, I just remember the buyer texting me later down the road and said they couldn't beat my high score in Tempest 2000 lol.
I always wanted a Jaguar. But by the time I was ready to buy, it was gone. Too bad, seemed cool.
Yeah, I bought a Jaguar for like $20-30 from KB Toys. It came with Cybermorph and Troy Aikman '95, and something else. I remember asking the clerk if they were sure that was the right price. There were no other games for it though. Even the few games I had were pretty bad and in general it provided little beyond being able to say I had one. Horrible controller.
So they knew it was so BAD that they were practically just giving it away... 😏
Thank god that the Atari 50 anniversary collection has jaguar games on it
I worked at a KayBee toys when this was released. I never sold one. Or a Lynx. 😂 Never knew a person who owned one.
The 3do was actually developer and publisher friendly. It had the cheapest royalties at $3 per game. It's why every major 3rd party had games for the 3do. Other than the PS1 it was the easiest console to develop for of that generation.
Some of the developers of the AMIGA computer made the 3DO . By the time it got released it would be out of date once the PlayStation and N64 would come out .
14:32 I remember back in the mid 90's having a modem for my PC - a 33.6Kbaud modem that had a dedicated headset port for communicating voice while playing a 2 player game via a direct modem connection. It actually worked OK, and was a lot more fun than typing.
The Jaguar controller actually isn't bad, in some ways it was my favorite part of the console. I think most people who criticize it never used one. The truth is the library just felt really underpowered, even the 32X library is just so obviously "next gen" compared to it. Too many Jaguar games were just exact ports from 16-bit systems or original titles that felt like they could have been on SNES/Genesis. A handful of games like AVP and Tempest 2000 felt as interesting as the stuff on Saturn/PS1 but the number of those that were Jag exclusive was incredibly small.
Controllers are always replaceable and was never an issue... It was the severe lack of games that obviously killed it.
@@OtomoTenzi totally agree, it just baffles me people bash on the controller, PS1, US Saturn and especially 3DO had just as many controller issues. I have nostalgia for Jaguar but it's "just becaue" nostalgia. There are only like 3 games I enjoy for it that can't be found elsewhere. Compare to Saturn and Dreamcast people consider "failed" where there are something like 200 games I truly love you can't find elsewhere. At least it wasn't wildly overpriced to compound the failure.
The Jaguar (including the CD add-on) only had 60 games, of those 60 games the few that were actually good (Tempest 2000, Rayman, Raiden, AVP, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, NBA Jam, Syndicate, Flashback, Primal Rage, Iron Soldier 1 & 2, etc.) all got ported to other platforms so there was no point in buying a Jaguar. I guess the only two good ones that remain Jaguar exclusives are Atari Kart and Super Burnout (not to be confuse with the Burnout series by Criterion Games) which Atari themselves owned but those were just lame racing games so nobody wants to buy a Jaguar just to play those.
it's important to note that the 3DO *debuted* at $700. It was very quickly discounted close to the Jaguar's price when no one bought any
Not only that, it only launch with one game for the first whole month. Many people who bought the 3DO at launch felt like they just got ripoff by that. $700 console and the only game you get is Crash 'n Burn, heck it wasn't even a bundle game either. It almost felt like Trip Hawkins is laughing at them. Those who bought NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, Super NES, Sega Genesis, and Turbo Grafx-16 got games like Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, Sonic the Hedgehog, Altered Beast, Tetris, Super Column, Super Mario Land, Pokemon Yellow, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario All-Stars, or Bonk which came bundle with the console but for 3DO you got nothing with that console.
atari didnt make pacman , namco did , taito created space invaders , the atari ST was a very successful computer in Europe , it was significant because it had midi in an out , it was the main computer in many recording studios .you could do with a bit more research mate
I remember this system as a young kid. No one in my school had it. It almost became some sort of myth being 64 bit.
I remember when Tempest 2000 was announced - being made by LLamamsoft and Jeff Minter (a household name in the UK for video games in the 80s), it created a lot of hype - I still think that it's the best game of the "official" launches and the only one that's instantly playable.
Minter wrote Tempest for the jaguar ?
@@andymouse sure did.
@@WatchWiseUS Cool, he's a legend :)
My main takeaway here is that I really want that gaming chair from the commercial
Good video, but I think it would have been cool if you had explained at the beginning the difference between the Atari arcade games company and the computer and condole company. A lot of people don't understand this.
I liked the video! This is about the max length I'm interested in, though.
With 64-bit processing power, 26.591Mhz of clockspeed, and a cart size capacity of at least 960+ megs; the Jag could've been a REAL GOOD candidate to port arcade and Neo Geo games on... 🤔
960 megabit (120 Megabyte) cartridges would probably have been too expensive to produce in 1993/94.
Maybe if they could go as high as 20 Megabytes it would be really good for the system at the time.
@@Turbulation1neo geo had those cartridges at home. Just the Jag is not compatible. So the 100% arcade premise breaks down .
Had a friend who had more -money- credit card debt than sense. He made it a point to buy every new console upon release. So I got to play the Jaguar and it was horrible. Only thing worse than the games was the controller. Felt like a small book in your hands. Releasing a console in that day with only 3 main buttons was puzzling; especially after the SNES and the revised Sega Genesis controller.
That was the craziest part to me. They had seen how popular SF2 and MK were and those require 6 and 4 buttons at the very least. 3 buttons even on the Genesis released in 1989 (USA) was very limiting. I wish I could get an answer from someone on what the hell they were thinking.
Its a math book!
I remember walking past Kaybee toys in my local mall seeing Jaguars being sold for $19.99 and still thinking, not worth it.
The Jaguar had good hardware, but was not accompanied by good software
No it was not. Haters claim that the IBM PC was bad, but in 1981 it was the best bang for the buck.
It should also be noted the Jaguar hardware needed another 2 revisions to iron out all the hardware bugs.
Atari never intended the original Jaguar to take on the Playstation and Saturn, that would of been the role of the Jaguar MK II, Jaguar was intended to take on DSP enhanced Sega MD and SNES games, 3DO,CD32 and CDi
The problem with the revision is that other companies did not sleep. I feel like energy was wasted on unimportant features. Why not stick to 16 bit cartridges? Why invent and adjust an object format when you have a GPU to control the blitter or videoDMA? Why are there scalar instructions which only exist because branches are too slow. Saturate is only needed once per pixel on Jpeg decompression. Likewise Absolute is only used once in 3d maths. Non-power of two frame buffers / textures? 5 bit conditions for jumps, but no overflow detection. MAC overflow.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldtThat was exactly the issue Atari faced with the Jaguar, they couldn't afford further delays, whilst hardware was further revised and bugs ironed out, as they knew Sega, Sony and Nintendo all had newer, far more powerful being worked on in their R+D labs.
Leonard Tramiel refusing to accept the hardware had issues didn't help, nor putting pressure on developers like Imagitec Design etc to texture map 3D titles, to be seen as being able compete with the 3DO in this area.
30 Years later and the Atari Jaguar still stirs many strong opinions when it's brought up. Amazing isn't it?
@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Yes, the Jaguar wasn't intended to take on the Playstation and Saturn. But doesn't the CoJag make you wonder if it *could have* if they would have, if they had gone with more aggressive hardware? Personally that question still drives me crazy, 30 years later.
@@Offramp-z7pEven if they had just taken some of the key features from the lower end CoJag hardware:Using a 25 MHz Motorola 68020...
4 megabytes of RAM, the system could of been really something.
I was also very surprised they allowed the awful spaghetti A. I code Jane Whittaker ran on the 68000 for AVP, which literally crippled the games frame rate.
An even larger cartridge for that game would of allowed for the planned full orchestral score.
But no everything was done on the bloody cheap.
I mostly played just the GameBoy Color, and the GBA during this era. I did not like the Nintendo 64 or PS1 during that time. But when the PS2 became affordable, I slowly returned to Console Gaming..
I got a Jaguar in 1994 with most of its best games. For a time it was the defacto place for hardcore FPS games on console. AVP was the stuff of legends especially in 1994. Nothing looked or played like it anywhere else in the console world. It still has the very best versions of Wolfenstein 3D and NBA Jams ever.
The Sega Master System is still making consoles circa 2025 and games!
Thanks for the video. I watched it because it's very likely next week I'll have my first Atari Jaguar 🐆🥳
18:45 Those systems aren't the original systems, they're the new "plus" systems. When you're referencing the modern systems and you say "2600" instead of "2600+," you're off by about 47 years.
The VCS is an original System I have one and it's awesome!
Love jaguar stuff and documentaries
Have you tried BigPEmu.
It's the best Jaguar emulalator and also supports Jaguar CD games.
It's one of the best designed modern emulators