I grew up with Atari. It was the captain of the industry and while their were competitors at the time they were completely overshadowed by the Atari 2600. It was really the only player in the game, so to speak for a long time and it might have been their market dominance that actually lead to their demise.

The Atari was basically the only console in the early to mid 80's and before the NES it was really your only option for home gaming. I would every now and the hear about someone, somewhere, that had Coleco-Vision but these things were few and far between. In the 70's and early 80's Atari had a damn near deadlock in home consoles but man oh man did they implode.

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When the console wars really got heated up in the late 80s and early 90's Sega Genesis was winning the war in what seemed previously to be a totally dominated by Nintendo market. Playstation was yet to exist and we didn't even really know what Microsoft was let alone an Xbox.

For those of us that had been along for the entire ride though we were always kind of wondering where the hell Atari was during all of this because they stayed relatively quiet when Sega and Nintendo were combating one another. When Atari announced that they were rejoining the race with the Atari Jaguar there was a lot of people including yours truly, that were very.. VERY interested to see what his once dominant force in the home gaming market had in store for us..

Unfortunately, they didn't have much... and certainly not in actual stores.

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For starters, on launch day the Atari Jaguar was almost impossible to acquire. I don't know if this scarcity was intentional on their part, but it ran out of stock very quickly in almost all stores. This is before we had internet for everything so we had to do this crazy thing called making actual phone calls to stores to see if they had them in stock, only to find out that they only received 25 units or something crazy like that.... and they all quickly sold out. Of everyone I knew, WE ALL wanted one but they just didn't have them ANYWHERE. It turns out that this was a nation-wide situation. The simply weren't ready for the launch day and not enough units were available.

Nevertheless, a friend of mine managed to get one of them and well... as much as he wanted to love it, It just wasn't very good.

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The Jaguar came with packed in game that was called Cybermorph and at that point in time we really kind of expected the games that came with the system to be an example of what the console was capable of. Cybermorph was kind of a copy of several other games and since this was the pack-in game we really expected a lot from it. Unfortunately it was (and still is) a completely terrible game that unfortunately was a tell-tale sign of what was to be expected of the console as a whole. It was jerky, terribly unresponsive, and just not very fun to play. For a system that Atari had been telling us in advertising campaigns for months was meant to be the best system ever, this wasn't a great way to start out. I was actually a lot worse than most anything that Genesis and the SNES had to offer and wasn't a good representation of amazing futuristic technology that we had been promised.

Unfortunately, things wouldn't get better for Atari either. After a completely botched launch of the system which would have seen hundreds of thousand of additional buyers had the consoles simply been available, they then proceeded to have an absolutely horrid line of games

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In fact, one of the only redeeming factors of this doomed system was Alien vs Predator which to this day remains one of the few praised games that this console ever produced. There was problems with the launch of this title as well because it was damn near impossible to get a copy of it as well, at least where I lived at the time.

In the end the Jaguar was beyond a market flop, it was an absolute abomination in the gaming industry. Why they ever released a CD add-on is something that remains a mystery to me to this day. It only had 13 games and according to the few people that could actually find one the damn thing didn't even work.

Combine this with the fact that almost no one had the base system at this point and the launch of the CD add-on really didn't make any sense.

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I really feel at this point that Atari was being run by monkeys because why would you release a $300 add-on for a system that nobody owns? It should come as zero surprise that Atari ceased to exist as a console-manufacturing company just months after the release of this terribly unnecessary add-on.

The biggest disappointment for me as a consumer at the time was the fact that there was some semblance of patriotism involved as an American because Atari was a powerhouse and basically the only player in the game in the late 70's and early 80's. After years of getting their asses kicked by SEGA and Nintendo we were almost hopeful that the Jaguar was going to be something amazing.

Unfortunately it was a piece of crap and even when they finally had units to fill the stores and were selling the consoles at a $100 loss per console you basically couldn't give these things away.

I was really excited when this thing was set to drop but in retrospect i am actually very pleased that the store I bought my stuff from, and all the others didn't have this in stock when i went there to buy it.

To this day it is considered one of the worst consoles ever made. So it should come as no surprise that Atari folded as a company shortly thereafter. It started with fantastic hype, but ultimately is was an incredibly flawed product that deserved to get relegated to obscurity.