Atari Jaguar
The Atari Jaguar was the attempt of the technology company to try and get a stronger foothold in the console market. Their name is synonymous with the games industry for many, but their success defies this assumption. Especially when you look at their more recent forays into the world of home consoles. The Atari Jaguar was one such attempt and showed the console market one thing; gamers as a collective were not going to lie down and take shit.
Atari tried to make the Jaguar’s selling point one which many will have seen happening again recently. Their marketing strategy revolved around jamming the face the Jaguar was a 64-bit system into the faces of games, claiming it was much more powerful other consoles which were only 16 bit systems . Now that should’ve worked, and yet it didn’t. Did we get a lucky break on that one. You see, the Atari Jaguar wasn’t actually the 64-bit system its manufacturer’s advertised. When the Sega Saturn and PlayStation rumbled onto the scene only a couple of years later, their 32-bit consoles blew the Jaguar out of the water.
There’s also something else we can all be grateful for in the failure that was the Atari Jaguar. It’s control pad was nothing short of a mess wrapped up in grey plastic. A D-pad, two shoulder buttons, and six standard buttons were nice to see. The utterly confusing telephone-style thing in the middle most certainly wasn’t. It did allow for developers to create their own unique add-ons for the controller, but that increased their own production costs thus making the Jaguar nothing short of a significant error in gaming.
Atari’s console failing was a blessing in disguise that helped shape how console manufacturers treated their customers. Not only did they (for the most part) stop lying about the specifications of their hardware, they stopped making such strange controllers.
