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All Jaguar Games In Order: Intro

Before defining the boundaries of this blog series, we need to answer an important question.

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Huh?

When looking into the history of the 3DO, I encountered a reference to The 3DO Company's CEO Trip Hawkins' thoughts on the new Atari console before its launch in 1993. He was initially worried about Atari providing competition for the 3DO and muddying the launch of his own console, or at least causing market confusion and hurting sales. That is, until the public unveiling the new Atari console, called the Jaguar, at the Chicago CES in August '93. After seeing it for himself, Hawkins ceased to have any concerns, he regarded the Jaguar as being beneath consideration. Time would prove that Trip Hawkins was correct in his assessment.

After the too-little-too-late failure of the 8-bit Atari 7800, the company decided to give the console market one more go. This ultimately resulted in the creation of a console with two 32-bit processors that were each nominally eight times faster than the SNES CPU, two whole entire megabytes of RAM which was again eight times more than the SNES, and supposedly CD quality audio. Though, the system used cartridges that were similar in size to contemporary 16-bit consoles. That flaw will become important. This whole package was priced at $249 for launch in late '93 and early '94. This was significantly cheaper than the 3DO, which was an eye-popping $700, but almost twice as much as the Genesis, which was only $129, and the SNES, which was $149.

The box, the myth, the hand cramps
The box, the myth, the hand cramps

There's also the issue of Atari's claim that the Jaguar was a 64-bit console, which was highly dubious and based solely on the presence of a 64-bit bus connecting the two 32-bit processors. I'm not an engineer, but that's probably not how bit classification is supposed to work. This controversy is indicative of the myriad problems with the Jaguar. From the number pad on the controller, to the non-existent third-party support, to making the completely wrong call on the future of video game formats, the story of the Jaguar is one of poor judgement and abject failure. This would be Atari's final home console and would be such an afterthought that all of its patents would get released after the Atari brand was sold off for scrap in 1998.

There is a whole book's worth of stuff to talk about regarding Atari in the 90's, but there's plenty of time for that. For now, we're concerned with the games that came out for the Jaguar, and their place in the context of the early 32-bit era of console games.

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What We're Doing Here

My look at the 3DO game library in All 3DO Games (Kinda) In Order would not be complete without also evaluating the alternative system, even if Trip Hawkins didn't consider it a competitor. As such, we're going to look at the Jaguar catalog as intermissions from the main 3DO series. I say 'intermission' because there isn't a ton to look at with this thing. When counting the Jaguar CD, there were a total of 62 games released for the system between November 23, 1993 and May 15, 1998. That is a fraction of the 3DO library, which is already small by console standards. With all of that in mind, let’s establish the ground rules for this thing.

  • I plan to publish entries in this series as breaks in the 3DO series, like how I'm handling the Playstation and Saturn.
  • I'm planning to include either 4 or 5 games per entry, which should come out to around the size of my 3DO posts most of the time.
  • As always, I will play the games until I get pissed off or bored, which should mean that total playtimes probably aren't going to average that high.
  • The emulation software for the Jaguar has recently become virtually flawless, but it works a bit differently than the software I've been using so who knows what's going to happen. Regardless, everyone should go support the creator of the BigPemu emulator, Rich Whitehouse, who is doing fantastic work.
  • I actually have hard and fast release dates for all of these games, which will create some awkwardness in lining up this series with the 3DO series. We'll see what I can do with that.
  • Finally, I'm going to stream my initial experiences with these games over on my twitch channel, which will put an asterisks on my play times for every single one of them.

With these basics established, I'll start and finish the Jaguar releases for 1993 with my first entry, which will cover Cybermorph, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, Evolution: Dino Dudes, and Raiden.

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