Atari Jaguar Console Review – Did The The Leap To 64 Bit Gaming Work?

atari jaguar console

Hey Star Struck Gaming fans we have thrown the editors underpants into the nuclear reactor and been blasted back to Atari HQ to witness one of the most surprising failures in Console history – the Atari Jaguar console.

We arrive in 1994 as Atari release the Atari Jaguar with its awesome name, it’s sleek black body and the first console to have 64 bit power what could possibly go wrong I mean Atari practically invented home gaming right?

The controller – that’s a joke right!?

Well let’s start with the utterly bizarre and poorly designed controller you Needed hands like Andre the giant to hold it due to its width and it’s 15 buttons it was a mess from the start, OK so you could have various moves etc at a touch of a button but reaching them was nigh on impossible.

atari jaguar console controller

These launch titles are awful

The consoles release titles were poor also with the likes of Cybermorph and Katasumi Ninja not being received well at all. The jaguar was also difficult to programme for causing many developers to avoid it (kind of what happened to the ps3) and games that were released were nothing more than the Megadrive or SNES could do, quite simply nobody had programmed for a 64 bit machine before and was easier to just stick with what they knew.

atari jaguar console cybermorph

Some of the later games were ok…

There were some decent titles released out of the 67 (yes 67) licensed titles such as DOOM, Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein and of course alien vs predator but they were not enough to keep the Jaguar afloat, In a attempt to try to keep the jaguar alive a life support machine was released known as the Jaguar CD (we are guessing Sega popped over and said we got this brilliant idea).

atari jaguar console

Poor sales don’t go down well

This failed to help the jaguar in the slightest and sales declined eventually the console only sold, 250,000 units and caused Atari to withdraw from making consoles all together and sad end to the ones that kind of started it all.

Atari had some brilliant ideas for the Atari Jaguar console along the lines multi tap adaptors allowing multi player gaming on one console a dial up Internet link and a virtual reality headset but due to the poor sales most of these were scrapped.

atari jaguar console Wolfenstein 3d

So the Atari Jaguar console in a nutshell?

The Atari Jaguar console could have been great but was a leap forward to soon from 16 bit to 64 bit was just to big a gap to adapt to for programmers and lacklustre games didn’t help the console, so on this sad note we are going to deliver a pizza to a cryochamber….

Thanks for reading and following fans see you in the future… Or the past

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