Was not releasing with CD at launch the biggest mistake Atari made with the Jaguar?

[Leeroy ST]

Imo yes.

 

There were many moves Atari made that were questionable, such as killing off nearly their entire product line except Jag and Lynx, then despite growth sandbagging lynx with concrete slowing it's momentum until killing it in 96 among other things.

 

But I believe the Jaguar would have succeeded for Atari (not win) and gained (and kept) more third party support if they released the Jaguar with a build in CD drive from the start.

 

Consider the main three problems Atari had when it made it's national launch in 1994:

 

1. Low production of consoles

2. Low production of cartridges

3. Low or cancelling third party support.

 

Now when Atari tested the Jaguar in 93, it was to show that the console was viable and shore up support. Strangely this worked despite only shipping out 20,000 consoles, all sold. Good press (mostly) resulted.

 

But this was an obvious indicator of a larger problem. Atari did not have the logistical access or cash to support mass production of the Jaguar up front. Which meant software had to help change this issue by making Atari enough money to correct the former.

 

However looking forward, AVP and other known bigger Jaguar titles released around the time the Jaguar finally mass released. Some of these were hits and well reviewed, such as the mentioned AVP. But Atari could not produce 100k cartridges for any of these titles. In fact for many they would be lucky to see 20k. This only marginally approved across the next year.

 

The low console sales and low software production not only hurt Atari but caused Third Parties to delay or cancel releases. In most cases the remaining TPs had ports of the same game or similar on other systems, and would generally advertise outside the Jaguar more so because there was a higher chance of larger shipment numbers on other machines, which potentially and often did = more money made. So even modest marketing of JAG titles was questionable for many 

 

If Atari had decided to go with a CD drive which was already years old by 1993-4, two of the 3 major problems the Jaguar faced would have been fixed, in turn fixing the third one and making Jaguar at least a decent selling financial success (and likely decimate the 3DO which was costly until late 95. )

 

How? Firstly it would improve the Jaguars image ,which initially was already positive, just because CD drives were hot at the time. It would also give greater video and audio capabilities right from the start.

 

In edition, CDs are cheaper and easier to produce, and a game like AVP could produce higher qualities from the jump, and adapt easier when demand is soaring. You have higher sales and cheaper production, which means more money for Atari. Also helps with distributing software across retail.

 

Secondly this would remove cost and risk significantly for third parties, and due to parity with 3DO and later PS1 and Sat, it would take not only less effort to port FROM the Jaguar but porting TO the Jaguar in the future. In some cases.

 

Hits would have plenty of copies to make money for TPs and scale on demand like other consoles, and prices would drop for consumers, giving them more of an incentive to buy since CD games cost less than Carts.

 

Then there's hardware costs. A CD Drive relatively wasn't much of an increase compared to sticking to cartridges but was more, but by mid 95 this switched and it became more expensive to produce the Jaguar as is while CD drives were cheap due to competition and demand. 

 

While 3DO was gaining momentum with games and price drops, by the time it hit 1 million in 95 at some point the Jaguar was selling 10k or less world wide for most months of the second half of the year. With a hand full of games out and fleeing third party support, and stores that sell consoles but no games, or games but no consoles, and sometimes no stores selling unless you drive 10 miles or mail order.

 

Now imagine a CD Jaguar that had better Tp support and could produce more copies of hit FP and TP games. You would have Jaguar with good library at $199 or $150 holidays in 95 compared to a nearly full year of 3DO being $400 or more, to being $299 by holidays 95.

 

The dynamic would have radically changed, and just in time before the PS1 and Sat come out. 3DO wouldn't be much of an element with a CD Jaguar and more support and production. 5-10 million ltd easily based on what Atari does in 96 onward, and likely a successor around 96-97.

 

Sure, some Jaguar issues a CD drive wouldn't fix would remain, though Atari having more money to address problems and improve dev kits and production would be a branch benefit to the CD drive.

 

But look at history now. 3DO releases nationally nearly a year before the JAG, a problem from the start, but without the CD Drive look what happened:

 

Low production test launch, low production after real launch.

Low production of games, people waiting for stores to receive games they never do. Same with consoles.

Third parties running away or doing poorly, then running away.

Terrible retail footprint.

Atari constantly bleeding money

Atari constantly low on money 

Atari only affording E-tier developers from Amiga.

Atari having to lay people off more and more resulting in smaller teams.

Limited marketing due to low money.

 

This allowed a $700 3DO to exist which dropped to $500 staying pricy for months outselling the Jaguar 4:1 despite being cheaper giving 3DO time to drop the price to $400 then $350 while building up FP and TP support with games selling hundreds of thousands and managing to sell over 1 million copies before it matched PS1 launch price of $299 when it launched.

 

Atari Jaguars failure is directly responsible for the success of the 3DO.

 

A Jaguar with decent to good distribution and software/hardware production, with a CD Drive, and decent TP support and better FP support, would have killed 3DO day 1, and likely would have had the console discontinued by end of 94 or early 95. In fact just the anticipation before release would have hurt 3DO. The perception it had as a powerful monster console with a sophisticated price would have never happened and the support it got would have been cut massively.

 

But as it stands the 3DO destroyed the Jaguar, with Atari's help, and ended up a pretty good gaming platform while the Jaguar nearly 30 years later still has homebrewers trying to find the imaginary secret sauce that proves Jaguar is more powerful than N64.

 

It's clear Atari realised it was a bone headed move because they quickly started working on the JAGCD less than a year from launch and had it out as fast, but it was an expensive separate add-on, with only some higher calibur devs jumping on board to support it a year AFTER IT WAS FINISHED giving it zero impact.

 

They should have just launched the thing with a CD drive, computers and consoles were using CD, it's competitor had CD, the announced consoles had CD and announced it would take a year after the Jaguar before they were ready to come to the states, they had soooo much time not to be stupid. While N64 had similar and unique consequences for using carts, they had money and larger production access. Atari did not have either from the start, so the cartridge route remaining in the final product continues to make less sense the more you think about it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bill Loguidice]

Being CD-based from the start would have likely helped with getting more software out there faster with lower-risk production runs, and certainly having more memory and fewer throughput bottlenecks would have helped on the performance side of things, but the reality is Atari wasn't equipped structurally or financially by that point to compete on a 1:1 basis on the software front. The post Atari 2600 Atari simply wasn't able to have a competitively large software library in either breadth or depth, which is why they always had the lowest native game counts of major systems released from 1982 onwards. 

 

I think we only have to look at the Dreamcast and Sega's own shaky financial status to see that even with fantastic hardware that gets almost everything right and even predicts some future gaming staples, hardware alone can't make something an ongoing success. In other words, short of a buyout by a larger company, there's likely no scenario where Atari lived to see another day even if the Jaguar got more right on the hardware side.

[Leeroy ST]

2 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Being CD-based from the start would have likely helped with getting more software out there faster with lower-risk production runs, and certainly having more memory and fewer throughput bottlenecks would have helped on the performance side of things, but the reality is Atari wasn't equipped structurally or financially by that point to compete on a 1:1 basis on the software front. The post Atari 2600 Atari simply wasn't able to have a competitively large software library in either breadth or depth, which is why they always had the lowest native game counts of major systems released from 1982 onwards. 

 

I think we only have to look at the Dreamcast and Sega's own shaky financial status to see that even with fantastic hardware that gets almost everything right and even predicts some future gaming staples, hardware alone can't make something an ongoing success. In other words, short of a buyout by a larger company, there's likely no scenario where Atari lived to see another day even if the Jaguar got more right on the hardware side.

I dont agree because a large reason for the split in Atari's support mid 80's onward was because they split support between console and computer.

 

The Jaguar as it was, lost ST/Falcon potential developers for similar reasons why the other TP devs ran away. So even if a CD Drive only brought a third of those back along with higher TP from console devs things would be significantly different, and the price and game difference would kill it's competition giving Jaguar a year to itself.

 

As for Atari's financial situation and whether it's  equipped to compete, I think you're making an assertion that a lot of people make where people mix up "profit" and "winning". A non-bleeding CD Jaguar with more support, distribution and production is key to Atari surviving. Whether Atari wins or not isn't relevant if they are selling millions in profitable software and consoles. It would be enough for them to create a successor which then maybe they could make deals or partner with someone to go bigger if they wanted, or to stay niche, or go TP, but they would be alive. The Jaguar was not meant to be the "winner" by the time it fully came out, it was supposed to keep Atari afloat by that point, and even then current Jaguar may have still went on if Sam didn't have his heart attack but that's another issue.

 

Even 3DO had to come up with a ridiculous business model to have the consoles exist in the first place, so no one was expecting Atari to go head to head with rich japanese companies when the Saturn and Ultra 64 were reported. Everyone knew Atari couldn't go 1:1 with guys like Sony, not even 3DO, this was common knowledge 

 

As for the Dreamcast it's not a very good example imo. Why? Because while Atari consolidated around the Jaguar they could still release the Jaguar. Sega could not release the Dreamcast, a few key players provided the funding and facilities for the DC launch to be possible so Sega was basically closer to Commodore during there CD32 phase than the Jaguar. DC lasted longer though, but almost ended in the same result but was saved by external interests when transitioning to Tp and then the merger later.

 

The only thing the Jaguar had to do was be profitable to still be around.

[Zerosquare]

The fate of the Jaguar (and the 3DO) was basically sealed as soon as the PS1 was released. Including the CD right from the start would have delayed the launch and made the console more expensive, thus reducing even further the window during which Atari wasn't competing with Sony.

 

Including the CD hardware right from the start also wouldn't have fixed:

- Atari's lack of money

- Atari's lack of understanding on why and how they should partner with developers

- Atari's lack of understanding of advertising

- Atari's lack of quality control (some first-party games were so bad they damaged the public's perception of the console)

- the pitiful documentation and software support for the CD hardware (it's so bad that even existing developers didn't want to touch it)

- the CD hardware's limitations (no extra RAM to compensate for the lack of cartridge ROM, so some games couldn't have been released on CDs)

- the CD hardware's lack of reliability

 

I strongly believe that it would have made the Jaguar fail commercially even harder.

Edited July 22, 2021 by Zerosquare

[rayik]

On 7/22/2021 at 3:17 PM, Zerosquare said:

Including the CD hardware right from the start also wouldn't have fixed:

- Atari's lack of money

- Atari's lack of understanding on why and how they should partner with developers

- Atari's lack of understanding of advertising

- Atari's lack of quality control (some first-party games were so bad they damaged the public's perception of the console)

- the pitiful documentation and software support for the CD hardware (it's so bad that even existing developers didn't want to touch it)

- the CD hardware's limitations (no extra RAM to compensate for the lack of cartridge ROM, so some games couldn't have been released on CDs)

- the CD hardware's lack of reliability

 

I strongly believe that it would have made the Jaguar fail commercially even harder.

 

+1

[+Sauron]

On 7/22/2021 at 12:11 PM, Leeroy ST said:

But as it stands the 3DO destroyed the Jaguar, with Atari's help, and ended up a pretty good gaming platform while the Jaguar nearly 30 years later still has homebrewers trying to find the imaginary secret sauce that proves Jaguar is more powerful than N64.

There is no secret sauce, as the Jaguar is not anywhere near as powerful as the N64. Any claims to the contrary are pure fantasy.

 

 

[sirlynxalot]

That really would have been the bleeding edge of tech for atari to do CD from the get go. If it came out in 1993, I think that would have made it one of the first game consoles to have CD as its media.  I agree with the other comments, it would not have saved atari or the jaguar as a product, atari just didn't have the resources to support the system.

[+madman]

The biggest mistake Atari made w/the Jaguar was spending money to develop and release the Jaguar. 

[+CyranoJ]

On 7/23/2021 at 4:41 AM, Leeroy ST said:

while the Jaguar nearly 30 years later still has homebrewers trying to find the imaginary secret sauce that proves Jaguar is more powerful than N64.

Only the ones who probably leak secret sauce into their undergarments several times a day.

[Major Havoc 2049]

I do think the Jaguar would have been better off as a CD system from the get go, as I think 3rd party support would have been slightly better for the Jag.  Cybermorph would of had music and maybe a few more textures.  Atari's biggest problem was lack of funds to properly support the Jaguar from the very start.

 

OP, I think some of your Jaguar CD history is off.  The Jag CD was mentioned as an add-on in the initial press release announcing the Jaguar and was shown at the first press event. 

[Clint Thompson]

Being released as a CD console takes away from the original design intent of the Jaguar entirely: to use minimal RAM (this is why it has so little) while pulling art/music assets directly from the cart (as was the original idea with the Panther), which isn't possible as a CD based system. You would need much more expensive RAM, not to mention the added loading times and expensive CD drive. Have you played Primal Rage for the Jaguar CD? Yikes! CD32 was $399 end of 1993, this would have have been just as much if not more. The Jaguar is the better system even without CD.

 

JagCD couldn't even launch until September of 1995 (and for $149 which was not at all expensive) due to constant technical issues during development and it shows, even in production form it's barely a reliable way to do things. I'm sure had they managed to release it early on, we certainly wouldn't have the VLM either. Hell, that's the only reason I bother with a Jaguar CD to this day.

[doctorclu]

About the only reason I wish the Jaguar released with a CD is so we could have a more uniform all in one unit.

 

Other than that, I think the Jaguar would have done about as well as it did.

[+CyranoJ]

37 minutes ago, Major Havoc 2049 said:

Cybermorph would of had music and maybe a few more textures.

Would it?

With just a CD I can tell you:

• No audio in Rebooteroids.
• No audio in Last Strike. 
• No chance in hell of Gravitic Mines in any form.
• No audio in Kobayashi Maru: Redux or Rocketeer: Rebooted on the reBOOTed compilation.
• No backdrop in Downfall+
• Nearly all the ST ports would be impossible to do with audio (and have insanely long load times)

It's delusional to think anyone at Atari would go out of their way to re-work or implement code to dodge the lack of ROM access. Also, the final nail in the coffin that everyone conveniently forgets.... the JagCD cannot 'stream audio' into the mixer for free. It has to be 'sampled' and manually mixed.... or you can use the CDBios.... but if you use that, you can't use one of the DSP or the GPU while doing it. Playing CD music actually costs CPU/Bus time and is a PITA.

Why would Atari spend money on CD audio for Cybermorph when they wouldn't even bother getting a MIDI or MOD file for it?

Lots of games with spot effects and no music would have been the result.

[Major Havoc 2049]

1 hour ago, CyranoJ said:

Would it?

With just a CD I can tell you:

• No audio in Rebooteroids.
• No audio in Last Strike. 
• No chance in hell of Gravitic Mines in any form.
• No audio in Kobayashi Maru: Redux or Rocketeer: Rebooted on the reBOOTed compilation.
• No backdrop in Downfall+
• Nearly all the ST ports would be impossible to do with audio (and have insanely long load times)

It's delusional to think anyone at Atari would go out of their way to re-work or implement code to dodge the lack of ROM access. Also, the final nail in the coffin that everyone conveniently forgets.... the JagCD cannot 'stream audio' into the mixer for free. It has to be 'sampled' and manually mixed.... or you can use the CDBios.... but if you use that, you can't use one of the DSP or the GPU while doing it. Playing CD music actually costs CPU/Bus time and is a PITA.

Why would Atari spend money on CD audio for Cybermorph when they wouldn't even bother getting a MIDI or MOD file for it?

Lots of games with spot effects and no music would have been the result.

I'm just a gamer dammit, not a coder! ?

 

If the Jaguar would have been a CD system, Sam Tramiel would have hired Trent Reznor to do the music for Cybermorph and life would be grand! ?

Edited July 24, 2021 by Major Havoc 2049

[Cebus Capucinis]

2 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

Only the ones who probably leak secret sauce into their undergarments several times a day.

Hey! I resemble that comment!

 

 

....wait, RESENT. I meant RESENT.

[+Gemintronic]

I vaguely remember CD ROM drives being expensive at the time.  Cheaper game production means nothing if the hardware investment is too risky for the consumer.

 

No.  I suspect the weak link was in development libraries and support for third party developers.  Same as always.

 

But, that is my hot take.  Could very well be off my meds.  Again.

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, Clint Thompson said:

to use minimal RAM (this is why it has so little) while pulling art/music assets directly from the cart

Thanks! I didn't know Jaguar was based around a design choice similar to the NeoGeo... And CD-ROM was not a good fit for the NeoGeo either, even though it was logically met with more success given the price of carts.

[+madman]

3 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

Thanks! I didn't know Jaguar was based around a design choice similar to the NeoGeo... And CD-ROM was not a good fit for the NeoGeo either, even though it was logically met with more success given the price of carts.

The Neo CD systems aren't just a Neo Geo with a CD added on like the Jag with the Jag CD so it's not really apples to apples. 

[roots.genoa]

35 minutes ago, madman said:

The Neo CD systems aren't just a Neo Geo with a CD added on like the Jag with the Jag CD so it's not really apples to apples. 

I guess so, yes.

[Lostdragon]

You've only got to look at statements made by the likes of Rob Nicholoson of Handmade Software (Jaguar chipset needed at least another 2 revisions to iron out the bugs) and John Carmack :

 

If the Jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony

 

Then you had the issue of  production issues with low chip yields of the Tom and Jerry Chipsets, meant the IBM Assembly plant couldn't produce the console in the numbers Atari wanted for launch.. 

 

 

Factor in the belief expressed by Mev Dinc of Vivid Image when Atari approached him with regards developing for the Panther:

 

 

 

' Maybe at the time I felt Atari wasn’t capable of challenging the other hardware manufacturers although they were one of the early pioneers.' 

 

 

And you get a basic idea of why third party support was always going to be a proverbial mountain for Atari to climb, even if the hardware had been a developers dream. 

 

We would of seen the Jaguar receive the same type of support the AMIGA CD32 received with it's existing 16-bit titles converted, but now with a CD intro, maybe an extra level or 2 thrown in. 

 

 

The likes of B. J West openly admitted Atari itself had no idea what CD games were supposed to equate into, the hardware flaws crippled the ambition and Atari itself killed the potential. 

 

 

 

'Before there was Black Ice, there was an open SKU for the next game we were going to make, but Atari had absolutely no idea what kind of game we should make.  The entire internal development team spent months pitching game proposals - everything from more cutesy animal-based platform shooters to Transfomer/Animporph style robot-cats-that-turn-into-other-stuff type games.

I campaigned hard to do a cyberpunk RPG, but the brass frankly knew almost nothing about gaming, and had no idea what I was talking about.  I gathered a few of my friends and put together a design doc and some presentation drawings, and pitched a game called The Chaos Agenda.  They totally didn't get it, but did some focus-testing anyway.  The results were so positive that they gave the project the green light.  The trademark department said there was some other game with a title too close to Chaos Agenda, so we renamed it Black Ice White Noise.

The very fact that I, who had never ever produced or designed a computer game or lead a team to create one, was able to muscle my way in and seize total control of a major SKU should have been the first warning sign that things weren't right at Atari.  All I had going for me was a passion for games, years of table-top gaming experience, a love of science fiction, and a loud voice.

That said, if we *had* been able to create the game we had designed, it would have been truly revolutionary.  It would have been the first open-world, non-linear adventure game, and Ken Rose's engine was (I believe) the first time anyone was able to run a large-scale continuous 3-D world streaming off of a disc with no loading waits.  That said, the Jag hardware wasn't really up to what we wanted to do.  Whatever power the chipset had was totally hamstrung by the lack of RAM, so our texture maps were tiny and chunky, and the lack of any way to save a game meant you'd have to play the whole thing all the way through in one go.  They kept promising some kind of cart you could save games to, but it never surfaced.

But the real obstacle we were up against was the company itself.  We spent the better part of two years and a quarter of a million dollars making Black Ice, but in the end, the development environment at Atari just wasn't up to the task.  They continually fought us on hiring artists and programmers, and buying contemporary computers - always trying to get us to scale back the game to something they could understand.  At times we were in talks with Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) to do the music, and were in talks with a movie production company about a film deal.  Atari tried to play hardball with both, and in the end, killed both deals, and in the long run, the entire game, and then the company as a whole'

 

 

We really should be amazed we got the titles with did, considering the state of Atari, the Jaguar hardware, the development environment and the working relationships between Atari and it's internal and external teams. 

[Lostdragon]

On 7/22/2021 at 9:17 PM, Zerosquare said:

The fate of the Jaguar (and the 3DO) was basically sealed as soon as the PS1 was released. Including the CD right from the start would have delayed the launch and made the console more expensive, thus reducing even further the window during which Atari wasn't competing with Sony.

 

Including the CD hardware right from the start also wouldn't have fixed:

- Atari's lack of money

- Atari's lack of understanding on why and how they should partner with developers

- Atari's lack of understanding of advertising

- Atari's lack of quality control (some first-party games were so bad they damaged the public's perception of the console)

- the pitiful documentation and software support for the CD hardware (it's so bad that even existing developers didn't want to touch it)

- the CD hardware's limitations (no extra RAM to compensate for the lack of cartridge ROM, so some games couldn't have been released on CDs)

- the CD hardware's lack of reliability

 

I strongly believe that it would have made the Jaguar fail commercially even harder.

You've only to look at the fiasco with the Saturn once the specs for the Playstation were released and Sony annouced it's retail price, to see just how easily a platforms fate can be sealed abd making knee-jerk reactions can only quicken said fate as you burn bridges with retailers and developers. 

[Lostdragon]

10 hours ago, Major Havoc 2049 said:

I do think the Jaguar would have been better off as a CD system from the get go, as I think 3rd party support would have been slightly better for the Jag.  Cybermorph would of had music and maybe a few more textures.  Atari's biggest problem was lack of funds to properly support the Jaguar from the very start.

 

OP, I think some of your Jaguar CD history is off.  The Jag CD was mentioned as an add-on in the initial press release announcing the Jaguar and was shown at the first press event. 

ATD explained at the time they had wanted to include some limited textures with Cybermorph, but found they had hit the limitations with the DSP, it had no free cycles. 

 

 

It's detailed in the interview they did with Edge magazine at the time. 

 

 

There's also this.. 

 

 

 

ATD talking about Atari insisting on Texture Mapping:

 

It was Leonard that wanted us to texture map everything in BattleMorph, and it was Leonard that insisted everything was textured in Hover Strike with disastrous results. Something that had been quite playable at 15-20fps, was crippled down to an unplayable 5fps as a result (it was only later that the Iron Soldier guys discovered a ‘hack’ which allowed the texture palette to be a texture source, doubling the speed of texture mapping for small textures).

http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/rvg-interviews-fred-gill/

 

 

 

Atari's biggest problem was Atari... 

[Lostdragon]

9 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

 

Why would Atari spend money on CD audio for Cybermorph when they wouldn't even bother getting a MIDI or MOD file for it?

Lots of games with spot effects and no music would have been the result.

We are talking the Atari who had animation etc cut from the original cartridge, so they could fit in onto a smaller one and save money on it as the in-game pack for later revisions. 

 

 

The Tramiel Family only wanted to cut corners on Cybermorph, not provide extra resources for it. 

[Lostdragon]

8 hours ago, Major Havoc 2049 said:

I'm just a gamer dammit, not a coder! ?

 

If the Jaguar would have been a CD system, Sam Tramiel would have hired Trent Reznor to do the music for Cybermorph and life would be grand! ?

? I refer you to B. J West comment about Atari and Trent Reznor in my earlier post. 

[+madman]

Wow, he's back. And still hasn't learned how to use multi-quote.