Atari, which once dominated the game console market, gradually declined under the siege of major new consoles led by FC. However, in the early 1990s, Atari obtained the Flare 2 console processor and began to work on it. Developing their new generation game console "Jaguar".
The host processor Flare 2 used by Jaguar comes from the British company Flare 1, which was established in 1986 by John Mathisen and Martin Brennan. When Atari used the new host chip to develop a host, its starting point was very high. Jaguar was known as the first 64-bit host at the time. Of course, because this host actually has a 32-bit CPU and only two co-processors and a 64-bit memory , there was a lot of controversy as to whether Jaguar was 64-bit at the time.
Atari signed a contract of up to 500 million US dollars with IBM company , which was responsible for the production, testing, packaging and distribution of the Jaguar console. However, there was not much market advertising investment when Jaguar was launched. At that time, the price of the console in North America was 249.99 Dollar.
Although the Jaguar host was controversial, it still received praise and expectations from many professional media in the early days. It's just that the product developed by Atari is really unfriendly to game developers, so there haven't been many supporting games since its release.
Under such circumstances, with the emergence of subsequent consoles such as SS and PS, Jaguar is completely destined to be eliminated. Atari Corporation also merged with JST Corporation on July 31, 1995, and the company's business also focused on PC game publishing. On December 23, 1996, JST began to clean up all Jaguar consoles and corresponding game software. At this point, Atari's last generation of consoles was swept into the trash heap of history.
And this also officially marks the true withdrawal of the legendary company of a generation of game consoles from the stage of history.
