Back in the early 90's when the console wars were in full swing there were about as many players in the market as we will likely ever see at one time. Sega, Nintendo, 3do, and even NEC had pretty great systems already out and well, Atari thought this was a good time to re-emerge. Atari had been out of the game for many years at this point as they were still reeling from the massive crash that many people believe that Atari actually created by allowing the release of so many horrible games in the early 80's.
The Jaguar was meant to be Atari's big boost back to the top..... and it was anything but
I will say this: They did a great job with the hype leading up to its release date. Virtually everyone i knew wanted one and this was Atari's first failure of many to come. Most of us couldn't actually get one because Atari had an accidental limited initial launch (they would later claim this was intentional) because they couldn't produce them fast enough due to the internal workings being so complicated to produce. This was just one of the many things they did terribly wrong.
The hardware inside the actual box actually WAS superior to other consoles that existed at the time but Atari failed to produce developer tools and this made it very difficult to make any games for the damn thing. Combine this with the fact that Atari already had a terrible reputation for mistreating third-party developers and well, the industry hadn't forgotten even though it had been nearly a decade. The end result of all this is that the doomed system ended up with a total library of a mere 56 games - with most of them getting horrible reviews.
The above game, called Cybermorph, was their big launch title and it was just terrible. Here Atari had been talking about how their game system has 64-bit processing power compared to SNES and Genesis 16-bits and the console was $100 more expensive than either and THIS was the end result? Just awful.
Unfortunately most of the games did not get any better and there are only 2 that I can recall that received any sort of real praise. This was Aliens vs. Predator and Rayman - which originally was ONLY on the Jaguar but by the time it was released in 1995 the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation were now on the market and literally no one was even talking about the Jaguar anymore.
Atari's last hurrah of advertising came around Christmas of 1995 where they had a campaign of half truths including that the Jaguar was the "only 64-bit game system on the market"
The problem with this was that the Jaguar had two 32-bit processors according to most people who reviewed it, and you can't simply add up the bits contained in each processor. If that was the case then the Sega Saturn was a 112-bt machine.
For me anyway, the lackluster performance of the Jaguar kind of killed my faith in "bits" as a measure of gaming power. The Jaguar was really just so awful, that if it was a 64 bit machine and the SNES and Genesis were only 16-bit machines (with better looking games) then what good is a bit? This of course wasn't the hardware's fault and it is pretty universally agreed that the Jaguar never really utilized its full potential because it was so buggy and the company just had terrible management and execution. Furthering their difficulties was that shortly after the release of the Jaguar the industry stopped using cartridges as the far superior Saturn and Playstation were both CD-based game machines.
I for whatever reason stood by Atari even after the release of the Saturn because it was something absurd like $500 when it was first released. I held on to hope that they would recover and discover how to use what actually was really good technology. However, just like giving a space-shuttle to a group of kids, it was never going to be used properly and myself and the mere 250,000 other people (all the units ever sold) ended up with disappointment to the bitter end.
Atari soon left the console market altogether after suffering near company-ending losses on this one project. Before fizzling out they had the audacity to shank their customers one last time with an unnecessary add on called the Jaguar-CD and only 12 games were ever made for it.
I wish I could say that Atari would be missed but after all the deception that I was spoon-fed as a teenager who didn't have very much money, i don't think i can ever forgive them.