How did the Jaguar possibly sell so poorly?

[Rick Dangerous]

I have been wondering about this lateley. The Jaguar was then most powerful next-gen system of the early 90's, and at $250 the price was right, yet about 200,000 were produced and even less than that sold. In comparison:

 

 

Phillips CD-I: 1 Million (this is a laugh considering there are like 3 good games for the system. Though might be explained by use as an interactive kiosk by companies, and/or vcd player?

 

Panasonic/Goldstar 3DO: 2 Million, admittedly better library overall and graphics on average due to ease of programming, but with a $500-$700 price point you think it would have sold similarly to the Jag.

 

Sega 32x: 665,00 Units. Similarly cheap like the Jag at a $160 launch price, but technically inferior and odd looking with minimal 3rd party support and anticipated lifespan. Yet someone bought 600k of them!

 

 

Did Jaguar invest next to nothing in marketing? Was Atari's reputation in tatters with consumers after the 7800 (which WAS a commercial success for them)? I'm just not sure how it's possible that a reasonably priced machine from a well known company that was the most powerful hardware on the market and had a number of decent games didn't sell more that 200k. Was it not available widely enough when buzz was at it's peak for the machine? Any insights or thoughts would be appreciated.

 

 

 

[MAYAman]

I have a pretty good handle on this situation as I worked for VGA magazine at the time and also had 4 import gaming stores that specialized in Japanese games, manga, swag. We were the first in CT to have the Neo Geo home console, the PSX, the Saturn. We rented all the games and system in those plastic clamshell cases and had all games available for you to try. Basically it was a much better and cooler FUNCO before there was a FUNCO.

 

Back then the kids I spoke to on a daily basis would all be talking about Nintendo or Sega, period! These kids weren't part of our generation of the 70s that grew up on Atari. Most of them weren't even born and had no idea what Atari even was. When I would mention that Atari was coming out with a new console, they would just stare at me blankly and then ask when Mortal Kombat was going to be out LOL.

 

When the Jaguar finally launched I remember I got my unit tucked away and about a dozen 20 and 30 something guys walked in asking for it. After that first day I would get sporadic customers for it despite having it showcased on the large screen TV in the Window. Kids would just look at it, and then walk directly to the Neo Geo or the SNES/Genesis section or right to the 8 arcade machines we had lining the side wall. Also, at that time the hype for PSX and Saturn was at frothy levels.

 

It was just a case of not enough hype, nobody knew it was coming out if I didn't tell them. Not enough games that showcased what the system can do, and just bad timing. The Jaguar had its loyal following at my stores, but it was just not enough. I still remember when Tempest 2000 came out, finally the SNES/Gen kids were like "whoa thats awesome" but then again, the PSX and Toshinden the Saturn just crushed it with the hype and the fact that more games came out at launch for those systems than the Jaguar had its first year.

 

I must always say though that I had a blast with my Jag back then and still do.

 

I ended up closing the stores in 98 because the local Blockbusters started renting games and systems and they ended up taking too much of my customers.

 

Wouldn't trade those days for anything though.

[Tenorman]

One thing I would add is I don't ever remember seeing a Jaguar at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, etc. Atari definitely did not have the same kind of distribution channels as Nintendo, Sega, or even 3DO. In order to find one you had to go to a specialty video game store in a larger city. I grew up in a small town in Iowa and I only ever saw Jaguar stuff in a couple of stores in Des Moines which was an hour's drive. Sega and Nintendo was all over the place.

[Rex Dart]

I was 12 in 1993. Owned an NES, SNES, and Genesis already. Why would I want a Jaguar? For ****in' Baldies? Knock-off fighting games in a flooded market? Atari sure didn't try very hard to convince. I know it was considered XTREEM in the 90s to dump on the competition, but that's all the Jaguar advertised. Atari just didn't have much to show for themselves at a time when other platforms had so much more to offer.

[Umberto]

Walmart did sell the jag, in fact it was Walmart that brought Atari to it knees when they forced Atari to take back the jags after a failed Christmas season

 

http://www.gamefaqs.com/jaguar/915842-jaguar/reviews/review-13214

 

http://www.whoopis.com/~mbates/atari.php

 

 

It was only as long ago as mid '95 that Atari executives and staff believed things were finally taking a better turn. Wal-Mart had agreed to place Jaguar game systems in 400 of their Superstores across the country. Largely based on this promise of new hope and the opportunities that open when such deals are made, Atari invested heavily in the product and mechanisms required to serve the Wal-Mart chain. But the philosophical beliefs of the Atari decision makers that great products never need advertising or promotions, put the Wal-Mart deal straight into a tailspin. With money tied up in the product on shelves as well as the costs to distribute them to get there, not much was left to saturate any marketplace with advertising. While parents rushed into stores to get their kids Saturns or PlayStations, the few that picked up the Jaguar were chastised by disappointed children on Christmas day.

Edited October 3, 2014 by Umberto

[MAYAman]

Yeah that too, my stores were the only ones other than NYC that had a Jaguar.

[Tenorman]

Walmart did sell the jag, in fact it was Walmart that brought Atari to it knees when they forced Atari to take back the jags after a failed Christmas season

 

OK, I will back off from the statement that Wal-Mart didn't have the Jaguar, but it was still a pretty small percentage of their stores:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Walmart

"By 1995, Walmart had 1,995 discount stores, 239 Supercenters..."

 

If Wal-Mart carried the Jaguar in 400 stores, that would still only be less than 1/5 of their stores, and probably only in larger markets.

[Rick Dangerous]

Back then the kids I spoke to on a daily basis would all be talking about Nintendo or Sega, period! These kids weren't part of our generation of the 70s that grew up on Atari. Most of them weren't even born and had no idea what Atari even was.

 

 

This is definitely true. When I was a kid in 91 there was nothing Atari related in any of the stores I frequented. I had heard of the brand, but knew nothing about the 2600 and thought they were a high end company making mostly arcade games. I thought they were high end because I had seen the Lynx on vacation and it looked advanced, exotic and expensive to me compared to my gameboy. I also saw a Jaguar box at some point and thought it was awesome looking but must also be a niche high-end product. I just never saw it in stores and was busy playing NES and Genesis with my friends.

 

 

Knock-off fighting games in a flooded market? Atari sure didn't try very hard to convince. I know it was considered XTREEM in the 90s to dump on the competition, but that's all the Jaguar advertised. Atari just didn't have much to show for themselves at a time when other platforms had so much more to offer.

 

Excellent point. I think it's easier to appreciate the Jaguar library for what it is now, in retrospect, with all titles available and a number of great later releases and home-brews. At the time it was a very flooded market and the industry leaders had a LOT of quality titles.

 

I still don't understand how the others CD-i/3DO sold more. Maybe 32x just because of brand recognition and placement. But the CD-i had VERY FEW quality titles and the 3DO was expensive as hell... Even a flop should sell 1 or 2 million like the 3DO, especially from a big name like ATARI, which I believe it still was at that point (2600, 7800 history, and arcade presence.)

Edited October 3, 2014 by travistouchdown

[Lost Dragon]

Basically between them Sega and Nintendo had the UK console market pretty much sown up tight.Master System had done well here, Nes made less of an impact, but Gameboy was huge, Game Gear put up a good fight had decent support from publishers, Lynx left trailing behind.

 

SNES and MD were engaged in a massive fight as it was with games like DKC, Toy Story, etc proving 16 Bitters could still be pushed further.Everyone knew Sega and Nintendo were busy working on true, next gen hardware, Saturn, Project Reality, hello here's Sony with this PS-X (as it was known then).What real chance did either Atari have with it's worlds 1st '64 Bit' console or Commodore with it's CD32? let alone the CD-i, which was always seen as a media device.

 

Atari had left a lot of it's customers simply burnt out after the failure of the Falcon, then Lynx (you can promise games till the cows come home, but if you fail to deliver? well folks have long memories).

[Austin]

I still don't understand how the others CD-i/3DO sold more. Maybe 32x just because of brand recognition and placement. But the CD-i had VERY FEW quality titles and the 3DO was expensive as hell... Even a flop should sell 1 or 2 million like the 3DO, especially from a big name like ATARI, which I believe it still was at that point (2600, 7800 history, and arcade presence.)

The 3DO was expensive as hell.. for like, a small portion of its life. When the PlayStation was ready, the 3DO had dropped considerably (and Goldstar stepped in with their model, which helped). By the end of its life, it had dropped immensely (FZ-10 model, $100 - $200). The 3DO stayed competitive.

 

The CD-i likely saw most of its units sold in the professional/working markets. The CD-i is not strictly a videogame platform. There are karaoke versions for working DJs, edutainment-based models for schooling or demonstration, etc., etc. Even still, at 700,000+ units sold, it was a massive failure. Philips lost an absurd amount of money gambling with (and sticking by) the CD-i all those years. You need to also keep in mind the the CD-i was introduced in 1991, and the last game was released in 1997 or 1998. It was on the market three times longer than the Jaguar, but failed to sell barely three times the amount of hardware.

 

As someone else posted above, the Jaguar had little to offer compared to the mainstream competition of the time. By the time it did, newer, more powerful consoles were out that impressed far more. Atari needed some seriously top-end software right out of the gate and better marketing. Instead, they provided rushed games that barely looked like an improvement from what the cheaper mainstream platforms were already offering. In an already crowded market, why do you think it should have sold more? Atari shot themselves in the foot right from the beginning.

[Lost Dragon]

It really was the 'sit tight, wait and see' era for many here in UK.If you had money to burn, take a risk on 3DO/32X, Jaguar etc, but most people i knew were content to wait till the Japanese giants had launched with Saturn and Playstation and then took sides and defended the purchase of thier choice until blue in the face.

 

Jaguar simply did'nt have the big names onboard (Namco, Psygnosis, E.A etc etc), did'nt have the 'appeal' (if it's not CD-based, it's not happening enough) and suffered from far too many 16 Bit ports to ever be taken seriousily and once the Jap hardware arrived, my god how UK press turned on Jaguar and 3DO.Horrendous period as same mags had months before been hyping up both platforms, but then they were'nt the ones forking out £100's for the hardware and games only to be bluntly told they were 'yesterdays news'.

[Lost Dragon]

Spot quiz in UK at that time:Ask any random. Atari Symbol T-shirt wearing student just what the iconic symbol plastered on said garment represented (or indeed who ATARI were), then wait for the blank looks....

 

 

It was just a 'cool' shirt..

 

 

Sad, but that was the case with how mighty were the fallen back then.

[Tickled_Pink]

There are so many reasons it failed. The big one for me was the lacklustre games. Some of the better games were already out on 16-bit platforms so there was little point in people buying them. Chances are they already had them on the ST or Amiga.

 

Most of the other games weren't much good. Certainly not 64-bit good and that was probably the problem game magazines had with the system. If you keep pushing the capabilities of the system, it heightens expectation. If you don't do anything to meet those expectations then reviewers are going to become disillusioned by the whole platform. And so the platform as a whole suffers. Reviewers back then were the lifeblood of any new system. That's probably not so much the case these days. Whenever I dug out my Jag and bought a new game, it wasn't long before I went back to Tempest 2000 again.

[+save2600]

Some good reads here. Poor distribution, scant advertising, goofy selection of games, broken promises, underwhelming titles when they finally did trickle out all helped contribute to the fairly quick demise of the system.

 

Game selection was really slow, so slow at one point, I remember being pissed off the week Synidicate and Theme Park were released. Had money to burn, but all that was available were games I didn't even want to play on my hard drive equipped Amiga 1200! Wanted to see the likes of Battlewheels, Mortal Kombat and Hardball! dammit.

[MAYAman]

A Jaguar Hardball would have been AWESOME!

[Bill Loguidice]

The software issue was definitely high on the list. Among the few launch titles, there were no killer apps and then the sluggish release schedule hurt any chance of building momentum. Most telling though was the pitiful third party support. Much was promised prior to release and little was ultimately delivered. Every system lives or dies on its software, and the Jaguar had no high profile titles. As was stated, even the 3DO got some high profile releases and support, thanks in large part to Electronic Arts. There were also more software releases for the 3DO thanks to it being CD-based. Of course, Atari did themselves no favors with releasing a CD add-on for a system that at that point sold well under 100,000 units. You simply can't split a minuscule user base even further, and then add insult to injury by releasing some incredibly dreadful CD games. The 32X had no such liability because it was an add-on for a user base comfortably in the tens of millions, with a strong International presence.

 

Why did the CD-i sell far more? Likely because Philips kept it on the market for a very long time, had a strong European presence, and was willing to stick with it. As was also stated, it had other uses as a media device, which, if not exactly helping it break sales records, didn't hurt either.

 

I worked in Electronics Boutique in New Jersey during the time all of these systems were on the shelf and it was painfully clear even then that the Jaguar was a no-go. There were literally a handful of titles on the shelves for it for far too long and nothing to really showcase why anyone should care. Compare that to the 3DO, which had cool CD demos and games like FIFA and Madden to show off its relative power, and it's obvious why once the price dropped to human levels that sales would have picked up.

 

Make no mistake though, the 3DO also had its share of vaporware, including a cool looking Star Trek The Next Generation game and EA's NHL Hockey (the only major sport besides baseball not represented on the platform), but even the promise of those somehow seemed more exciting than what was being promised on the Jaguar side, likely because we already had examples of other games where we could see how cool those might be.

[108 Stars]

32X games did not really look inferior, and it had more good games in its year on the market. Really no miracle it beat the Jag while it was there imo. The Jaguar lived from Tempest, Doom and AvP mostly.

 

The 32X had Virtua Racing and Virtua fighter, both of which were unparalleled on Jaguar. Doom was there, inferior, but it was good enough for people. Star Wars, big franchise and also technically a fine 3D game for the time, something the Jaguar lacked. Also the best selling Sega game of Christmas 94. It had the best version of MK II to date. Even the ports of antiquated Sega arcade games like Space Harrier and Afterburner were likely better received by gamers than what the Jaguar had. Imo, the 32X had a pretty damn fine good/bad ratio in its games compared to the Jaguar.

 

The Jaguar's software was just not very well received, and if a system offers mostly gamest hat are either not exclusive or get mediocre reviews, that doesn't help.

 

The matter has been talked to death, but the Jaguar simply died because Atari had neither the cash to market it well, nor to develop games of the quality it would have needed. Even if the hardware didn't have issues, that's still useless if you push out games that are below average.

 

And honestly, I wasn't in the US at the time, but in Germany, pretty much everybody KNEW the Jag was a stillborn. The media knew. The gamers knew that this was not something to spend money on. I knew when I saw it on display with Kasumi Ninja in late 1994. It was a valiant effort, but even in 1993 when it was released, I highly doubt that people within the industry gave it much of a chance to succeed. The 32X and the 3DO were held in much higher regard and with better future perspective; Jaguar was the underdog even amongst underdogs at the time. And Atari failed to persuade them otherwise with impressive software and marketing.

Edited October 3, 2014 by 108 Stars

[dashv]

As a gamer that started on the Atari 2600 I was obsessed as hell with this console from the first time I read about it in Game Pro. My uncle would give me his magazines when he was done with them. I cut out every article and ad I could find at the time. I even kept a list of the games that were being announced and asterisk'd the ones I wanted. I drooled over the specs of the Tom and Jerry CPUs and how the console was just going to kick everything else in the nuts...

 

Never ended up getting one. In part because of the price. My family didn't have a lot of money so we were told to be happy with our 8-bit Nintendo. Even if we had the money I never saw one in a store and we didn't have a credit card to make mail order purchases.

 

I kept all the information I collected on the Jaguar in a manilla folder. I actually found the folder while cleaning out my garage a month ago.

 

To date I have yet to see the console in anything other than pictures and following up now I see that many of the games I listed either never came out or have ratings of 5 or less (out of 10).

 

Still debating if my missing out on it all was actually a good thing.

[MAYAman]

Get a Jaguar, Tempest 2000, and a Chaos Reigns rotary controller and that is all you really need. You'll play it forever.

[dashv]

Get a Jaguar, Tempest 2000, and a Chaos Reigns rotary controller and that is all you really need. You'll play it forever.

Yeah, Tempest 2000 is the one that leaves me conflicted. Everyone says that game is amazing. Jon Carmack also raved about the Jaguar port of Doom.

 

Didn't know about the rotary controller.

[Bill Loguidice]

Yeah, Tempest 2000 is the one that leaves me conflicted. Everyone says that game is amazing. Jon Carmack also raved about the Jaguar port of Doom.

 

Didn't know about the rotary controller.

 

It's awesome, but getting a Jaguar, Tempest cartridge, and rotary controller is a lot of money for the option to play one game, especially considering that a game like its spiritual successor, TxK, is free on PlayStation Plus for PS Vita owners. I'd say there are maybe half a dozen games truly worth the effort on the Jaguar.

[Willard]

If (going by the Wikipedia articles) you look at the total sales you can see that, relative to the leading consoles (turbografx, genesis, snes), all of those consoles did miserably. so while the Jaguar did the worst by a margin relative to the mentioned consoles, it really didn't do much worse than the rest of them compared to the top 3 consoles on the market- they all got crushed.

 

 

The CDI came out around the same time as the SNES in Europe and north America so some people may have actually bought it instead of a SNES at first. Edutainment was also a thing at the time and it was also a CD-Rom system in '91, which was impressive. It was also used institutionally as others mentioned, in stores like k-mart for promo and training at companies like GM.

 

The 3DO came out a little before the Jaguar and got some real support, and some mass appeal games that had a real high budget feel, especially at the time. The loads of FMV and lots of 3D texture mapped games were undoubtedly very impressive at the time. I think the 3DO took steps to differentiate, while the Jaguar kind of wanted to compete head on with Sega and Nintendo

 

[+thegoldenband]

When I first read about the Jaguar I was intrigued, and the 64-bit hype did catch my interest. That said, back in the day I got a 5200 for Christmas -- which got me controllers that were basically DOA and a console that was discontinued almost instantly, and left me with an enduring feeling of having been screwed by a cynical company. Between that and the general feeling that Atari was a company whose time and cultural cachet were long past, I wasn't looking to get a Jaguar.

 

However, when I saw the ads for Tempest 2000 on TV, that definitely got my attention, since I loved Tempest in the arcade. If I'd had the opportunity and funds I might well have been tempted to pick one up. And if Atari had pushed the "flashy updates of arcade classics" angle hard, it would've appealed to me. (Major Havoc 3D? Sign me up!)

 

Make no mistake though, the 3DO also had its share of vaporware, including a cool looking Star Trek The Next Generation game and EA's NHL Hockey (the only major sport besides baseball not represented on the platform)

 

There was a Japanese-exclusive baseball game for 3DO, however (Pro Yakyuu Virtual Stadium). I haven't played it yet, though oddly enough I own it -- a sealed copy I bought for $1!

[Bill Loguidice]

If (going by the Wikipedia articles) you look at the total sales you can see that, relative to the leading consoles (turbografx, genesis, snes), all of those consoles did miserably. so while the Jaguar did the worst by a margin relative to the mentioned consoles, it really didn't do much worse than the rest of them compared to the top 3 consoles on the market- they all got crushed.

 

The fact remains that the Jaguar probably did worse than any other major/significant console release, ever, particularly in consideration of the era it was released and what was sold before it went on closeout. While it's true that there are the obvious blockbuster successes, then everyone else, the Jaguar wasn't even in the conversation at any point after its release. That's what I think makes it particularly intriguing beyond the obvious of it being the console that Atari went out with (keeping in mind that it was not the original Atari, but still the last Atari that had any real ties to that lineage).

[Bill Loguidice]

There was a Japanese-exclusive baseball game for 3DO, however (Pro Yakyuu Virtual Stadium). I haven't played it yet, though oddly enough I own it -- a sealed copy I bought for $1!

 

Ah yes, I forgot about Japan. I have a handful of Japanese-only titles, but not that one. I didn't see any videos online, but based on the stills, it looks little better than a 16-bit title, unlike the US football, soccer, and basketball games.