History 2 - RAW! JAGUAR!

 In the early 90s the video game market was owned by Nintendo and Sega. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis were the two major consoles on the market, both consoles being 16 bit systems. The early 90s was a period of time called the Bit Wars by some. Many people didn't even know what Bits were aside from better graphics, but they knew they wanted more bits. In basic terms, having the amount of bits a system had meant how many bits one element could handle at a time, more bits meant a faster system with better capabilities. This meant that advertising was filled by talk of bits.

Now Atari in the past used to be king of the video game industry, but were falling behind in the Console wars right now. But just like in life, in the console wars when you play the game of thrones you win or you die. But Atari had experience and age on their side. Their attempt to get back the crown of console gaming, which currently was being shared by mostly Nintendo and Sega, is something that really interests me. That's mostly why I'm doing one of these big blog posts about it, obviously.

 The Atari Jaguar!

 First of all, what a brilliant name for a console. It sounded aggressive and badass, the perfect name for a console trying to regain the crown! It was released over a year between 1993 and 1994 with a mass of advertising campaigns, all boasting one key thing about the Jaguar. It was a 64 bit console. This first came out in America far before the Sony Playstation which was still only a 32 bit system, and the N64 another 64 bit system wouldn't come out for a couple more years. So obviously they wanted to advertise the 64 bit system! And they did. Hilariously.

They even insulted the other systems:

 Now why wasn't the Jaguar a super success? Because it wasn't actually 64 bit. Well, it was and it wasn't . Technically, the Jaguar did have 64 bits of processing power, but it actually used a mix of processors, 32 and 16 bit, to add up to 64 bit. This ended up making the console actually weaker than the 32 bit Playstation, which Atari's CEO even admitted. So, people didn't like it. In 1995 after the release, Atari lost over half of their revenue. The stockholders were so frustrated Atari released this message to them :

From the introduction of Jaguar in late 1993 through the end of 1995, Atari sold approximately 125,000 units of Jaguar. As of December 31, 1995, Atari had approximately 100,000 units of Jaguar in inventory.

You would think after being so central to the Video Game Crash of the 80s that Atari would know better and would be able to avoid such a universal failure. That being said however, supposedly the Jaguar still has a very active fan-base, and home made games are still made for the system. So it's got that going for it, which is nice.