26 Facts About Atari Jaguar

Atari Jaguar is a home video game console developed by Atari Corporation and released in North America in November 1993.

The Atari Jaguar launched with Cybermorph as the pack-in game, which received divisive reviews.

Development of the Atari Jaguar started in the early 1990s by Flare Technology, which focused on the system after cancellation of the Atari Panther console.

Atari Jaguar was developed by the members of Flare Technology, a company formed by Martin Brennan and John Mathieson.

Work on the Jaguar design progressed faster than expected, so Atari canceled the Panther project to focus on the more promising Jaguar.

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Atari Jaguar was unveiled in August 1993 at the Chicago Consumer Entertainment Show.

All 20, 000 Atari Jaguar units shipped during its test launch in 1993 were sold.

Atari Jaguar was launched on November 23, 1993, at a price of $249.

Atari Jaguar reported that it had shipped 17, 000 units as part of the system's initial test market in 1993.

Atari had "ventured late into third party software support" for the Jaguar while competing console 3DO's "18 month public relations blitz" would result in "an avalanche of software support", the magazine reported.

Atari Jaguar did eventually earn praise with games such as Tempest 2000, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D.

However, these occasional successes were seen as insufficient while the Jaguar's competitors were receiving a continual stream of critically acclaimed software; GamePro concluded their rave review of Alien vs Predator by remarking "If Atari can turn out a dozen more games like AvP, Jaguar owners could truly rest easy and enjoy their purchase.

Atari's reasoning that the 32-bit Tom and Jerry chips work in tandem to add up to a 64-bit system was ridiculed in a mini-editorial by Electronic Gaming Monthly, which commented that "If Sega did the math for the Sega Saturn the way Atari did the math for their 64-bit Jaguar system, the Sega Saturn would be a 112-bit monster of a machine.

In early 1995, Atari announced that they had dropped the price of the Jaguar to $149.

Atari Jaguar ran infomercials with enthusiastic salesmen touting the game system.

Jaguar sales were substantially below Atari's expectations, and Atari's business and financial results were materially adversely affected in 1995 as Atari continued to invest heavily in Jaguar game development, entered into arrangements to publish certain licensed titles and reduced the retail price for its Jaguar console unit.

Atari Jaguar provides these blocks with a 64-bit data path to external memory devices, and is capable of a very high data transfer rate into external dynamic RAM.

The Atari Jaguar Duo was a proposal to integrate the Jaguar CD to make a new console, a concept similar to the TurboDuo and Genesis CDX.

An unofficial expansion peripheral for the Atari Jaguar dubbed the "Catbox" was released by the Rockford, Illinois company ICD.

An adaptor for the Atari Jaguar that allows for WebTV access was revealed in 1998; one prototype is known to exist.

Atari Jaguar did eventually earn praise with games such as Tempest 2000, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D.

However, these occasional successes were seen as insufficient while the Jaguar's competitors were receiving a continual stream of critically acclaimed software; GamePro concluded their rave review of Alien vs Predator by remarking "If Atari can turn out a dozen more games like AvP, Jaguar owners could truly rest easy and enjoy their purchase.

Game Players stated the despite being 64-bit, the Atari Jaguar is much less powerful than the 3DO, Saturn, and PlayStation, even when supplemented with the Atari Jaguar CD.

In 2006 IGN editor Craig Harris rated the standard Jaguar controller as the worst game controller ever, criticizing the unwarranted recycling of the 1980s "phone keypad" format and the small number of action buttons, which he found particularly unwise given that Atari was actively trying to court fighting game fans to the system.

On May 14, 1999, Hasbro Interactive announced that it had released all patents to the Atari Jaguar, declaring it an open platform; this opened the doors for extensive homebrew development.

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Hasbro Interactive, along with all the Atari Jaguar properties, was sold to Infogrames on January 29, 2001.