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 Which consoles are you most likely to find gathering dust at Goodwill next to the Beta VCRs and 8-track players? By GameSpy Staff | February 25, 2004 
Consoles are the life's blood of video games. After all, you can't play games without one. For every Atari VCS and Sony PlayStation that took the world by storm and sold millions of units, there are handfuls of failures that disappeared from the market within a couple of years. In this Top 10, we run down the most notable underachieving consoles. Some never should've been released in the first place, while others had infinite potential but couldn't attract enough consumers. Some were too expensive, while others didn't have enough software support. Each one has a tale to tell, making them all short-lived but interesting entries in the annals of video-game history. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you may just dig out that old console from your closet and have a nostalgic reunion.
10. Atari Jaguar 
In 1991, Sega's Genesis had taken the lead over the underpowered NES, and Nintendo was just about to release its SNES. From out of nowhere, Atari announced the Panther, another 16-bit system set to compete with those powerhouses. After a quiet two years, however, a bigger cat was announced: the Jaguar. Boasting 64-bit technology, the Jaguar sounded light years ahead of anything the public had ever seen before. After all, 64 is a much higher number than 16, right? It turns out the system wasn't exactly 64-bit in every conceivable way, but it would still be the most powerful thing on the market. When the console released in 1993, it seemed to have everything going for it: an affordable price ($249), lots of muscle, and a familiar company name. Atari made a few odd decisions with Jaguar, though. The massive controller had more buttons than a telephone, but only three of them were placed in traditional positions. Even though CD-ROM was gaining prominence, Atari chose to stick with the cartridge format. A CD attachment was released later, but it was like trying to give mouth-to-mouth to a skeleton. And besides, it made the unit look like a toilet. Jaguar's games themselves left a lot to be desired. Many were just polished 16-bit ports, and original titles like Air Cars didn't look any better than SNES games utilizing the FX chip. Doing 3D as a whole was not a strong suit for the Jaguar, and attempts at it (Fight For Life, the Virtua Fighter wannabe, for example) were just embarrassing.
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What Went Wrong: Really, a better question would be "What went right?" From its poorly distributed launch in 1993 right through to its ignominious death in 1995, the Atari Jaguar was one disaster after another. I should know -- I was among the first to buy one in 1994, thanks to relentless hyping in the notorious Die Hard Game Fan. Game Fan hyped the thing raw in its inimitable way ("Atari is back ... come pet the cat.") so I was expecting something amazing. Instead I got a $250 hunk of plastic that ran Cybermorph, a strangely mediocre pack-in game that had nothing on Super Mario Bros., or even Altered Beast. As the months passed, the software releases crawled onto EB's shelves like crippled slugs, and consisted of a generally un-compelling mix of un-enhanced 16-bit ports and Amiga-spawned Eurotrash. Until I bought the motorcycle racer Super Burnout last year, my Jag library consisted of five games. The Jag was clearly not the best investment I've ever made.
