The Atari Jaguar console was an infamous flop that led to Atari exiting the console business. One of the problems the console had was not having enough games, and not having enough AAA titles. But how many Atari Jaguar games were there?
There were more Atari Jaguar games than it seemed like
By the time all was said and done, there were about 50 Atari Jaguar games commercially released during the consoles lifetime. The caveat being that some of the titles were released after Atari left the market, but the console was still available through liquidators. So some of the titles fell into the too-little-too-late category. Yes, they hit the market when it was still possible to buy the console new in box. But they arrived too late to slow or stop the console’s demise. Not to mention Atari’s own demise.
And 50 titles wasn’t enough anyway. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time if 50 titles a year was going to be enough to keep up with Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. It might have worked, if the quality had been there. Atari wanted to deliver 50 titles a year, which would have nearly kept pace with the very successful Atari 2600. But their efforts only ended up producing 50 titles in total, some of them after Atari had given up. And the quality didn’t end up being what anyone wanted either.
How many Atari Jaguar games were sold?
As Atari was selling off its remaining inventory, a great deal of company records got mixed in with the inventory. That means we know more about the individual Jaguar titles than we necessarily know about the more popular consoles’ titles.
We know that Alien vs. Predator was the most popular title for the Atari Jaguar, and we know it sold around 57,000 copies.
We know that many of the less popular titles sold 25,000 copies or less, some of them potentially as part of liquidation bundles.
Some of the titles released after Atari formally exited the business sold considerably less. After Hasbro acquired Atari’s intellectual property and announced that independent publishers were free to release software for the console as long as they didn’t represent them as being endorsed by Hasbro or Atari, one of the developers bought the rights to unreleased titles and published them independently.
This was more of a labor of love than out of an expectation of making much of a profit. Some of these titles only sold a few hundred copies, since the target market was basically collectors.
The relative scarcity is why the Jaguar and its games are expensive today.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.