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How is the Jaguar scarce?


Rick Dangerous

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What I mean is, how is a console that should have greater supply than demand commanding such prices and thought of as "scarce."

 

This could apply to anything Jaguar related.

 

-Consoles

-Jag CD's

-Game

-Accessories

 

There were 200kish consoles produces, 20k jag cds, thousands of copies of each game.

 

Realistically there are a few hundred, maybe a few thousand (tops) active Jaguar gamers and collectors out there.

 

So my questions is, is the actual scarcity (i.e. prices) manufactured (by greedy hoarder types), or are jaguar and jaguar related items actually hard to come by (i.e. many have been thrown away, are stored in basements by people who don't realize they have them, production numbers lower than actually thought, etc. etc.)

 

Curious to hear your thoughts on this. My take is that it's manufactured as part of the retro gaming craze right now and there is actually plenty of Jaguar consoles, Jag CD's and games for anyone who wants them if the price wasn't so high due to speculation.

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I believe the demand is higher than the supply on these hard to come by items.

And they are hard to come by because they've been thrown away as broken, or are stored in basements, stuck in more and more collections (the craze), and all we have are the items that pop up on the market which is not all of them.

Why people "demand" this system we all have our own takes on =)

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I suspect the initial numbers are lower than we think, and that many of them have been destroyed or otherwise thrown away. There was a time when you could get a big set of Jaguar stuff from places like Tiger Electronics. I can't imagine they held onto their unsold stock forever. Telegames seemed to have a lot of stock, too -- I wonder what they did with it?

 

Rare does not equal good, of course.

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....

Realistically there are a few hundred, maybe a few thousand (tops) active Jaguar gamers and collectors out there.

....

I am afraid this statement is severely underestimating the people that get into retrogaming/collecting and stumble upon the Jag.

 

Once the run of the mill SNES/MD and PS1/Sat/N64 have been acquired (and there's plenty to go around and relatively cheap at that) in between the 2 gens the Jag stands out as the next collectible/interesting system (3DO may be on par, but anything else is a distant second at best and NeoGeo is a beast of its own in this regard).

So the "few thousands worldwide Jag gamers" count may well be a little on the low side, although many may not be active at all anymore .... with the loot stashed away in a box.

And there's the kind that really is into collecting so they have 2 of each (one to store and one to play).

With the very low numbers involved I am not that surprised.

 

Good thing is that once the prices go above a certain level the items become less interesting to the retrogamer (but more to the collector kind) so a certain stability would kind of ensue (stability of demand not of prices as the supply is limited and actually lowering as unit breaks etc....)

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So her is kinda my real life take as I got it. Jaguar came out and sold some units. Great way to go then a few months down the road it hit bargain bin. After that the over stock went where? When I bought mine there were plenty left on the shelf so one can assume when Atari said nope just toss them that's what happened. Now game though were a different subject they probably passed through several places before ending up in random warehouses. That could be due to the fact that retailers contacted the publishing groups and decisions were slower to be made. Honestly beyond my own Jaguar locally I have not seen a single other one but I have seen plenty of games.

 

So could this be the great Jag mystery. We know 200K were made but how many were just trashed out never to see the power at the end of the wall and such.

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I can only imagine how many Jaguar's got fried and thrown away due to plugging in the wrong power supply :lol:

 

My friend did that recently. Luckily there is a local repair guy who is amazing on the bench. He actually installed a protective diode so the system won't fry again in a similar situation.

 

But.....you have a good point. How many people actually bother to repair things or find someone who can? I'm sure a few thousand Jaguars have been trashed...Which makes me a sad panda.

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I am still waiting for the moment some poor place opens up a warehouse full of boxed Jag and Jag Cd units and Games. I feel its out there someplace waiting to be discovered. It might even be on the back of the Declaration of Bankruptcy for Atari document.

 

You might be waiting for a very long time. I'm betting they're mostly e-waste now.

 

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Electronic-waste-in-Accra-008.jpgewaste_02.jpg

china_003.jpg

 

 

And probably a long way from the western world, unlike the ET cartridges of Atari Corp.

trashOrGold.jpg

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So her is kinda my real life take as I got it. Jaguar came out and sold some units. Great way to go then a few months down the road it hit bargain bin. After that the over stock went where?...

When that stuff hit the bargain bin, tons of people bought the stuff. I remember when KBtoys had new Jag games in this huge bin at $11.00 each (I must have bought 12 that day). I forgot what they charged for the consoles at that time, but it was cheap as well. Within about two weekends the stuff was sold out. I then remember many of the standard Jaguar controllers went to places like All Electronics. I bought about 4 controllers BITD when All Electronics was selling that stuff. They were only 9.00 each. I think the pro controllers (which I bought two at the time) were $15.00 each. That stuff didn't last long from there either. I really think the Jag is one of those consoles that's just sitting in people closets/storage that they bought them cheap and got forgotten. They show up on ebay when someone finds them.

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I really think the Jag is one of those consoles that's just sitting in people closets/storage that they bought them cheap and got forgotten. They show up on ebay when someone finds them.

So long as when they do come out of the closet or storage they don't turn into a Coleco Chameleon.

 

"Wow a Jaguar and a mini SNES I got a great idea." ;)

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So 200K Jaguars. Or 150K. Hard to say. (Man those landfill pictures were hard to see). :(

 

Of the Jaguar fans you have several hundred that are really vocal and known, but you have many lurker collectors out there. That 10K to 20K might be fairly accurate.

 

I know I personally have about five Jaguars. Two don't work. If other Jaguar owners had several Jaguars that would add up quickly.

 

Game Exchange in Arlington has two non-working Jaguars in their museum. Sure others are out there as display models. And yes, many thrown away.

 

So can see why the scarsity would be there.

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Yeah we shouldn't assume that AA and a few other forums are the sole refuge of Jaguar owners. I have a few friends with old games (not Jaguar) that never bother getting online and talking about them with others.

 

Jaguar had low production numbers. Factor in attrition losses and storage. The Jaguar's limited numbers are also scattered over 3 continents It doesn't have to be much more complicated an explanation. It's actually scarce, for real. I don't think there's any hype involved. People try once in awhile, mind you, but I don't find it very effective. Consider every Nintendo system, which are all produced in the millions and millions, all average way more expensive to collect for than the Jaguar.

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When thinking of the supply side of supply and demand for jaguars, I think, more than it being broken systems which has reduced supply, all jag owners have not put their systems up for sale at any one time... instead they lie forgotten in closets and basements, or hooked up or stored by gamers and collectors. Even if 50% of all 200,000ish consoles had been destroyed due to being broken/thrown out or otherwise completely lost - the remaining 100,000 are not all for sale at any one time. Instead only a handful are for sale at any one time while demand is greater than a handful.

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Both the Jag and the Lynx lack notoriety amongst gamers and the general public, and collectors suffer for it. If no one knows about the systems, they're not going to look in their storage units for them and offer them up for sale. Heck, the Jaguar never makes those worst-selling-console/biggest gaming flops lists on yahoo and the like (notwithstanding the irrefutable numbers) and if it can't even muster negative press it's not in the public consciousness. There are tons of units out there -- I'm sure that most of the public just doesn't know that there's a market for this.

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I've owned 6 or so Jaguars in my life and 2 of them were dead - so feel free to scratch off 2 from that 200k list ;-)

 

The next time you get a dead Jaguar, feel free to send it my way ;) That goes for literally all game systems really. If you're gonna throw it out... PLEASE DON'T! Notify me, and I'll pay you to send it to me!

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The next time you get a dead Jaguar, feel free to send it my way ;) That goes for literally all game systems really. If you're gonna throw it out... PLEASE DON'T! Notify me, and I'll pay you to send it to me!

 

I assure you the last one you wouldn't have wanted. It was unusually rust/rotted in the most bizarre places and all the chips were literally toast as a result, like it's been sitting submerged in a lake for years... but I'll keep you in mind for sure.

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I assure you the last one you wouldn't have wanted. It was unusually rust/rotted in the most bizarre places and all the chips were literally toast as a result, like it's been sitting submerged in a lake for years... but I'll keep you in mind for sure.

 

A Genesis I recently bought on eBay had RF shielding that was literally only rust. In fact it fell apart when I was removing it. The system was covered in rust, the 68000 pins were rust... everything was rust. I applied flux, reflowed some solder, replaced one of the 7805's and now it works like new! It doesn't look very nice... but it works.

 

Anyways, I honestly don't care if a system is total garbage. At the very least I can remove EVERY component and have an original PCB to work with. I've done this in the past... and I HIGHLY recommend never doing it. But if you remove all components, you can repair the silkscreen of a PCB making it look brand new (repairing broken traces is where things start getting nasty).

 

Anyways, I had a rather rare Famiclone a while back and I did the above. I removed everything, until all that was left was the PCB, then I reinstalled EVERY component with brand new replacements. It took a very long time... I honestly have no idea how I went through installing every resistor, capacitor, and transistor millimeter by millimeter

 

But that whole week is a blur anyways. My doctor put me on some medication called "Provigil" when this happened (I just skimmed the wiki page, and apparently the drug works in a similar way to Cocaine... which sounds just god awful. How is this good for people?! I digress) Anyways, I was up for 6 days straight; basically manic the whole time... I did so much stuff that week that I thought was ingenious. And after I was hospitalized, stabilized with Valium, then sent home... literally everything I worked on, I looked at and thought to myself "How did I ever think that was a good idea?"

 

Not that anyone asked... but I wrote all that... so I might as well post it.

Edited by SwampFox56
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It would be generous to think that there are more than a few thousand active Jaguar owners at best, and I'd err on the lower side of that myself, maybe even <1,000. You always have to allow for systems stored away in attics, broken systems, trashed systems, mutliple system owners among those few thousand (at best) active owners, etc.

 

With all that in mind, it's easy to see how a few hundred thousand existing consoles at best and less than a few tens of thousands of CD units (which are more fragile) can easily dwindle in terms of actively available systems on the market, particularly as more time passes and particularly since we have to assume that active Jaguar users aren't selling. We're not talking something like an Atari 2600, Genesis, NES, etc., where tens of millions of units are in circulation. Even with maybe tens of thousands of active fans of those specific systems and all the other factors mentioned in lowering the pool of available systems, they still have an incredible number of systems to work with. In other words, the Jaguar platform started out with a comparative deficit as soon as it was discontinued and all the other factors related to the Jaguar (it's notoriety, Atari's last system, etc.) all contribute to the relative scarcity and collectible value we see today.

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I forgot what they charged for the consoles at that time, but it was cheap as well.

 

$35 for a brand new Jag. For a little while it was more expensive to buy a new copy of Doom or AvP than it was to buy the console. Snagging brand new Jag games out of the bargain bin was awesome though.

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I know I'm not the only one who has bought more than a couple jags! After I bought my 3rd and newest one I told myself I'm never selling this time lol.

My Jag CD Unit I know is more rare but I still wonder if there were more than 20,000 units made, it's hard to know for sure. ?

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