(Gameplay - 3480) Atari Jaguar, Part 1/1 (ONL - 25)
1Still lingering in the console race years after losing the gaming public's trust and playing a significant part in The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, Atari Corp decided to chip in with a new effort to get a head start on the next generation in gaming. They hired some outside help to engineer both an experimental 32- and 64-bit console, codenamed "Panther" and "Jaguar" respectively. The 32-bit Panther was scrapped in favor of solely working on the Jaguar thanks to how well its development was going in comparison, and the system was out the door as early as 1993 with a price of $249.99 and an aggressive marketing campaign against its competitors, the 16-bit SNES and Sega Genesis and the 32-bit 3DO. Consumers were urged to "do the math" and choose the 64-bit system instead, because apparently having more bits automatically meant the system was obviously superior and it was definitely not just marketing hype.
While Atari claimed that the Jaguar was a beast of a 64-bit system, many games barely looked better than what you'd find on either of its 16-bit competitors or the 3DO, especially compared to the latter when it came to 3D. Outside of the fact that determining power based on the bit number is a gross oversimplification of how bits work, the Jaguar was poorly documented and hard to program for, so developers often defaulted to using the system's Motorola 68000 chip as the main processor instead of its 32-bit chips "Tom" and "Jerry". The 68000 was meant to function as a "manager" that wouldn't actually do any heavy lifting, but due to the aforementioned poor documentation and the chip's history of use in previous computers and game consoles, it was the only part of the hardware most developers were comfortable using; unfortunately, the end result was that the Jaguar effectively became an overclocked Sega Genesis when the 68000 was used this way. The system also inexplicably lacked dedicated audio hardware,note famously leading to its otherwise decent port of Doom lacking music during gameplay, and only having the soundtrack on the title screen and intermissions. These issues led to a common belief that the Jaguar wasn't truly 64-bit and that the technical specs were exaggerated for marketing by adding up the bit numbers of its multiple processors. Whether or not the Jaguar is a true 64-bit system isn't entirely agreed upon, but it definitely isn't on par with the Nintendo 64 and is actually weaker than the PlayStation, a 32-bit system. Many consider the Jaguar to be the biggest blow to the "bits" marketing gimmick due to this; while the Nintendo 64 would still make use of it, the Jaguar's poor showing was what thoroughly cemented public indifference in its usage.
The Jaguar's controller tried to combine a numpad-style button layout that was in vogue during the tail end of The Golden Age of Video Games with a traditional controller, which led to it having a whopping 17 buttons. It was criticized for being overly complicated and cumbersome to use. Ironically, the controller was ill-suited for fighting games despite its excess of buttons and Atari's attempts to make the Jaguar appeal to that specific crowd. A new ProController had to be released to make fighting games playable on the system.
Another factor that didn't help was the actions (to put it mildly) of then-Atari president Sam Tramiel (son of Jack) in trying to promote the Jaguar in the press. Several interviews he gave, most famously one that was given to Next Generation magazine, revealed Tramiel to be completely out of touch with the technical specifics of the Jaguar, often giving vague non-answers to questions regarding the Jaguar's power compared to its contemporaries. Another of Sam's antics that lost him a lot of goodwill was a letter he wrote to GamePro magazine, blasting the magazine's writers and editors for pointing out the lack of third party support (specifically Capcom and its stable of arcade titles) and giving a response that sounded almost pleading, saying "We at Atari are doing all we can to cultivate new and exciting experiences on the Jaguar...I ask gamers to write to their favorite publishers and ask them to write software for the Jaguar." and ended the letter with "We...welcome comments from the enthusiasts who read GamePro." GamePro, never ones to hide an opposing voice, called Tramiel's bluff and printed both the letter and the address of Atari's offices in their April 1994 issue. Incidents like these did a lot to damage Atari's already tenuous relationship with industry press and gamers.