Stupidest gaming purchases I ever made: The Atari Jaguar

I suppose that it can be forgiven that I made this really awful purchase considering the time period that it came out in. The internet actually DID exist at the time but there wasn't really much to be found on it other than pictures of naked ladies that took ages to load.

There certainly wasn't anything like YouTube where you could preview some of the games that a new console was going to have on it. Also, our enthusiasm for Atari make a grand re-entrance to the gaming industry had all of us old boys lining up to see what years of silence from the once "King of gaming" company had accomplished.

Unfortunately, they hadn't accomplished a great deal and this console would end up spelling the end for Atari as a company.

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The launch price was $249 and at the time (1993) this was considered a very high price. With all the hype about this being an ultra-powerful system and the sexy look of the console we were duped into really wanting one of these things. The graphics that they allowed us to see pre-launch looked damn awesome but these had been doctored heavily for the promos because your actual game experience was very different than the commercials.

Adjusted for inflation it cost nearly $450 in today's money. So yeah, it was quite expensive especially when you consider what we ended up getting for our money.

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I don't exactly remember if StarFox had been released around this time, I think it had been, but that was the main reason why many of us were excited about the game "Cybermorph" that came packaged with the system. This was most people's first exposure to what Jaguar gaming was going to be like and wow, was that game ever a piece of crap. Despite the claims that this new system was much more powerful that the competition it just looked like shit. Things in the distance didn't even load into view until you were right on top of them so navigating was a massive pain in the ass. I think I spent most of my time crashing into poorly rendered mountains.

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Enemies looked like moving mountains as they were poorly drawn as well. The entire game functioned like a slow version of StarFox. It blows my mind that Atari thought that packaging this game with the system was a good idea. Normally a packed in game is meant to reveal what the system is capable of and blow away the customer and therefore entice them to go out and buy more games. "Cybermorph" accomplished the opposite of that.

But herein lies another problem. The Jaguar launch date had an extremely poor selection of games to choose from on release. Not that it really mattered because the stores were woefully understocked as far as both consoles and games were concerned. If it was Atari's plan to create the illusion of sale popularity like Sony does from time to time is anyone's guess but looking at the overall incompetence of Atari it was probably just an accident. The system probably could have sold a lot better because when I was at Toys R Us picking up my pre-ordered console, there were dozens of displeased customers there who wanted a Jaguar, but couldn't get one because it was sold out.

There were only 3 games available at launch and I ended up playing them all between me and my 2 friends who also made the horrible mistake of buying this console. They were all terrible. "Trevor McFur" could be considered decent, but that was only in comparison to the other 2 launch titles.

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But herein lies another problem. This new system was touted as being 4x as powerful at the other existing systems at the time yet the Sega Genesis has shooters that were FAR superior to this game.

To make matters worse, there wouldn't be any additional game releases for the Jaguar until nearly 4 months later and by that time my interest in the system had almost completely disappeared. I think this was the prevailing opinion of the Jaguar community because sales of the system slipped dramatically by the time there were any meaningful number of games available for the system. Seriously Atari, what the hell were you thinking?

There was only a couple of games that ever appeared on the system at all that would be considered even remotely good and one of the best ones was "Alien vs Predator." This was the last game I purchased for the system and given the time period it was actually a very good game. This title was released nearly a full year after the console hit the USA market and by that point, sales of the console had almost completely dried up. By the end of 1994, a full year after the initial release, Atari had managed to only sell 100,000 consoles in the USA.

We never really got to see what this machine was capable of because due to the idiocy of the launch, no real developers ever really got on board to make games for the machine. By the time the system was retired and Atari gave up, they had a total library of a mere 50 games. Atari had the audacity to try to sell a CD peripheral add on despite not having anywhere near the amount of existing customers to justify the production of such a thing. Only 13 games were ever made for this thing and there were reports of many of the units simply not working right out of the box.

There's a rather funny video that AVGN made about how he tried, but simply couldn't get a Jaguar CD to function.

Skip ahead to 10:19 to see the part where he can't get the CD add-on to function at all despite having some seriously tech-savvy friends. This guy is really wealthy, so if he can't get it to work, imagine what normal people had to go through?

The Jaguar release would end up only lasting until 1996 before Atari finally gave up. This system ended up being the end of Atari as a standalone company. They were acquired by Hasbro and Hasbro was so uninterested in the Jaguar that they made all the programming and game titles open source. If that doesn't tell you how much of a piece of crap the Jaguar was, I don't know what will.

In a way I am kind of happy that I made this purchase because it taught me a very valuable lesson about letting hype trick me into making rash purchases. From that day forward I very rarely pre-ordered anything. In fact, I became a late adopter of most consoles and games sometimes waiting years after a game or console had been released before I got involved. So for that I think you Atari, you taught me a very valuable life lesson that has stuck with me to this day.