Syracuse Herald Journal, November 1994: Al Fasoldt recalls when, with savvy marketing, the gaming companies could earn media acclaim for its new products.

“Wall Street is the last place you’d expect video games to make headlines, but that’s just what is happening this fall. The new darling of investors is Atari, whose stock has tripled and then tripled again in recent months as the company geared up for the introduction this week of a revolutionary video-game machine called the Jaguar.

“The only competitor for the Jaguar is the so-called 3DO game system, which is appearing under the Panasonic name and other brand names. It costs three times as much as the Jaguar and cannot match the Jaguar’s performance, although it is expected to sell widely because of its connection with Panasonic.”

If you want proof the video game industry was still young, consider the Atari Jaguar: in 1994, nobody understood the new console’s competition was Sega and Nintendo. The nineties are littered with the bones of companies who believed consumers could sustain separate levels of premium and budget consoles. History today shows successful consoles are built on programmer-friendly, medium-end hardware, and companies publishing for the Jaguar were given high-end hardware that was impossible to program for. So Atari’s marketing team was forced to contrive a story from its superior hardware. The badassery of the Atari Jaguar Promotional Pamphlet taught us gaming wasn’t about fun: it was about doing the math.

The Controller:

In 1994, it was a dozen years since Warner Communications doomed the Atari 2600 under its corporate cocksucking. Journalists following the company’s fourth and final console followed started their own oral exposition, doubtfully a measure of consumer reception. In 1995, Stephen L. Kent of Entertainment News Service stated that:

“As a chunk of hardware, it’s difficult not to like the Atari Jaguar. Its 15-button [sic] game pad is the most ergonomic on the market.”

Terry D. England wrote in the “New Mexican”, as published in May of 1994:

“The controller has 17 buttons and a standard joystick. The game cartridges can store 100,000 separate joystick setups”.

Just as the Knicks don’t need five scorers on the floor who all create their own shot and play independently of each other, a good video game only needs one controller setup. But 15 (17, 18, 40, “didn’t really care”, depending on who you ask) buttons isn’t unmanageable: the Dual Shock 2 demonstrated this. Atari’s Jaguar controller did not.

Taking hints from the bank vault where Atari lit most of their money on fire, they added a combination keypad to the Genesis controller. Forget cell-phone and hamburger jokes, my favorite gag is the pamphlet’s aversion to knobs, particularly when the Atari was touting Doom as its system-seller. Let’s forget that Halo and Goldeneye owe their fame to the analog stick, m’kay?

The Specifications:

You can spend months digging erroneous errors from this pamphlet, namely the Jaguar’s system architecture (two 32-bit chips working in unison) and the color palettes of the SNES (256 from a selection of 32,768) and Genesis (64 from a selection of 512). I’ll supply the most glaring omission:

If you treat Seanbaby’s 20 Worst Games of All-Time as serious academic critique (and all self-respecting gamers should), three of the 58 Jaguar games make that list. One in twenty Jaguar games are one of the twenty worst. Confused by that last line? You’re no different than someone who tried to program games for this machine.

The future:

Kasumi Ninja features a Kilt-wearing Scot who launches fireballs from his ass. Ultra Vortex (later named Ultra Vortek) featured a “fatality” system known as Poopalities. They failed on every level. Third-party developers eventually bowed from supporting the system, leaving Atari’s supporters to run ports of games from inferior systems. Atariage recalls:

Christmas of 1994 was very important to Atari, but unfortunately it was a weak holiday season for videogames in general. Lackluster titles such as Checkered Flag, Kasumi Ninja, and Club Drive didn’t help. The Sega Saturn was lurking on the horizon, and gamers seemed content to spend money on their Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo systems instead of buying a Jaguar. In late 1995, the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation were released in the U.S., and fans quickly forgot about Atari’s machine. Even though it claimed to be superior in processing power (64-bit vs. 32-bit), that now seemed either inaccurate or irrelevant given the demonstrations by Sony and Sega’s new consoles. Atari wasn’t giving up however, and they announced the release of their CD-ROM attachment, Pro Controller, and some marquee titles like Primal Rage and NBA Jam Tournament Edition.

The 64-Bit Interactive Multimedia System!!11FORTY-FUCKING-SEVEN

Entry over. Nothing can top the redundancy and/or the awesomeness of the Virtual Light Machine light show. If you disagree, just Do the Math™. Atari did, and left the console market without a significant American competitor for nearly six years.