Atari Jaguar, We Hardly Knew Ye
July 26, 2007
Caught up in the mid-1990's madness of outdoing other consoles with more bits, Atari made one final run to bring back those living room domination days of yore with the Atari Jaguar. The plucky console made some bold promises, but in the end it just couldn't compete. Now the shocking true story behind Jaguar's life can be told.
“He trained really hard. The kid literally showed up for practice literally every day at 6am and would often leave at 10pm at night.” Jaguar’s former agent, Robert Sherman, recalled fondly. “By his premiere date he had a Tom 26.59 MHz Processor, a 32 Bit RISC architecture, a 64-bit blitter processor, a Motorola 68000 processor, a Two DACs, and a lot more. I’ve met a lot of consoles over the course of my career, but I rarely met one as determined as Jaguar. He was really something else.”
I knew that the Jaguar was supposedly very advanced in some aspects, but I had no idea it had achieved sentience before its tragic demise. I'm surprised that the console wasn't buried in the family plot, although by the time it died I suppose there wasn't anyone left alive in the Atari console family to bury it.