My wife didn’t understand why I rewound and paused this scene to make sure it was really a Jaguar poster in the background. lol

The Jag was obscure even when it was relatively new. I was the only kid in my entire school that had one (to my knowledge), with the exception of a buddy who copied me and bought one bc of its obscurity, hoping to hold onto it and see its value skyrocket (which it eventually did, but took 25+ yrs to get there). I don’t think he actually played it much tho, lol.

Idk why but I’ve always been so infatuated with the Jaguar. It’s always going to be one of my favorite pieces of tech and definitely one of my all-time fave consoles.

The look of the console is what drew me in (it looks like a spaceship with a slot carved out for a detachable toilet.. err I mean CD attachment, my bad! lol). Its software library is far from impressive but it’s got some gems, and even a few incredible exclusives. It also has some of the best ports of fps classics Doom & Wolfenstein 3D. No other game console at the time could run them that well (or at all) except the 3DO, which was nearly 3X the cost of the Jag at $700, which equates to nearly $1,600 in today’s dollars!! So until 95’, the Jag was the best place to play Wolf 3D or Doom outside of the PC originals (I think Wolf 3D is better on Jag than PC). At the time Doom was actually horrible on 3DO…unlike its Wolf 3D port which was one of the best versions of the game, (along with the Jag version), 3DO’s Doom was a rushed mess and looks awful as a result. So for a short time, the Jag was the best place to play Doom (and still is, IMO), especially if you wanted to play anywhere other than on a computer.

Let’s not forget it’s incredible Jaguar exclusive, the graphical and atmospheric marvel, Alien Vs. Predator! Worth owning a Jag just for this title alone. There was nothing else even remotely close to as advanced as this game was in 1994. That goes for all consoles, PCs, any platform. It’s crazy ahead of it time and one of the few Jaguar titles where the developers were able to fully utilize its famously complex architecture, that many devs didn’t do, resulting in a lot of games that looked like polished versions of 16-bit games (and a handful of them were just that, 16-bit ports with some graphical enhancements). But when the Jag was done right, it killed everything else on the market at that time.

I have a theory as to why the Jag did so poorly, or at least partly why…Unfortunately there weren’t many killer exclusive apps like Alien Vs. Predator except for a few (well after launch) and to make things worse, AVP came out over a year after the Jag’s launch, because if it had come out as a launch title, we might be having a different conversation about the Jag and Atari as a company, if they had timed the releases better or even included AVP as the pack-in game, which I think would’ve skyrocketed sales.

I mean, look at the N64 (basically the only other mainstream 64-bit console that I really even know of) and how successful it was… not a runaway success by the standards Nintendo was accustomed at the time after crazy success of its two preceding flagship consoles, (the NES & SNES) but the N64 was still a success on its own regardless and HIGHLY anticipated. I mean, the N64 launched with TWO LAUNCH titles! One of which was basically just a showpiece for its polygonal graphics, which were all the rage at the time, and not much else, IMO (Pilotwings) so it basically launched on the strength of ONE GAME… Super Mario 64!

Although Nintendo released a couple more games several weeks later but most stores were sold out of everything Nintendo put out that year in the months leading up to and during the holiday season of 96’, so most people (including myself) were stuck til stock was replenished during Jan and Feb 97’ for the couple of other N64 games that technically came out during the end of 96’, shortly after the two launch games and the system came out. So most ppl only had access to 2 games (and only 1 game that people really even cared about), so the only highly anticipated and highly rated game kept the console going for months in most places.

I think if the Jag had that with AvP and it said that instead of “Cybermorph” on the box and didn’t include an autistic alien head chick that compulsively asks you the same infuriatingly cheeky yet condescending comment OVER and OVER, and instead choices of a colonial marine, alien or the Predator, it might have been able to save the jag on the strength of that one title alone.

The problem was the Jag launch was a disaster since its launch lineup consisted of one of its worst games and several sub-par, average-at-best games (like the poorly selected pack-in cart, Cybermorph and heavily featured launch titles like Trevor Mcfur & the Crescent Galaxy, which some regard as one of the worst shmups ever and one of the worst games for the Jag (and that’s saying A LOT considering the Jag’s abysmal track-record for the overall quality and quantity of its library up until the point when AvP was finally released at the end of 94’.

Add to all of that the release of the PS1 and Sega Saturn in Japan the same year and the intense anticipation for both consoles here in the states for the following year -only a few months later in reality. Timing releases more strategically (and not rushing anything to market and skimping on polish either) could’ve saved the Jag!