Got a Jaguar for Kwanzaa, what's good?

[Steve Contra]

[ToxicAdam]

Minter is an overrated hack.

[bork]

[Joe Molotov]

[cool breeze]

Fight for Life is an underrated gem.



Flip Out is where Miyamoto found inspiration a couple Mario Galaxy levels.  Club Drive is the best racer with Club and Drive in the title.   

[HyperZoneWasAwesome]

for reasons that still aren't clear, the Jaguar got the best looking version of Wolfenstien 3D by far (port done by ID, with redrawn sprites and smooth gameplay).  Seeing this in 1994 was actually pretty darn cool.  Yup, the Jaguar had the tech edge all to itself for a good solid six month window back in 94'.

[benjipwns]

That one interview Sam Tramiel gave while in the middle of a coke bender or whatever.

[cool breeze]

for reasons that still aren't clear, the Jaguar got the best looking version of Wolfenstien 3D by far (port done by ID, with redrawn sprites and smooth gameplay).  Seeing this in 1994 was actually pretty darn cool.  Yup, the Jaguar had the tech edge all to itself for a good solid six month window back in 94'.

yeah, I think most of my time playing wolfenstein 3d was on the jaguar.  it was one of the couple games included with my jaguar and I was surprised with how solid it was.  it and sensible soccer were the two I put any real time into.

[Human Snorenado]

I thought about making this thread

[Trent Dole]

Oddly hypnotic. Somebody's gonna make track with this someday.

[benjipwns]

Seriously: http://strider.untergrund.net/toxicmag/toxic15/articles/tramiel.htm
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/90927-sam-tramiel-interview-next-generation-1995/

NG : Would you describe the manner of Sony's "invasion" of the gaming market as arrogant?

Sam : Yes. I think that's very fair. Were you at ECTS [European Computer Trade Show]? Our booth was next door to the Sony booth and Sony's was... enormous. It was a huge booth, they had blaring music, we couldn't hear ourselves talk in our stands. We asked them to turn it down, they wouldn't. Their posters looked dreadful. It was just horrible. I think it was very tasteless. They were like a gorilla in a china shop.

NG : Sony is saying that PlayStation will come out at $299 in the US, and rumors would suggest that a $249 price is possible. This would be a tremendous threat even to a $149 Jaguar, right?

Sam : If Sony comes in at $249 or $299, we'll do whatever we can to have the ITC -- that's the International Trade Commission of the United States -- to go after them. That's called dumping. You can't have the Japanese consumer paying a fattened dollar price, then subsidize the product and dump it in the United States for $249 and kill the US manufacturers. It's against the law.

NG : There's actually a law against doing that?

Sam : Yes. It's absolutely against the law. That sort of operation is called dumping and there's an anti-dumping provision.

NG : And Atari would have no hesitation in bringing the law into effect on this one?

Sam : In a nanosecond. You can't do that. We'll go for it, we're not going to be put out of business.

NG : So what would you see as a fair price -- a legal price -- for PlayStation in the US?

Sam : $500.

NG : The same as it was priced in Japan.

Sam : Exactly. And as long as we can keep pricing good software for our machine at $149, we've got a very good chance of giving them a difficult time.

NG : Why has the Jaguar CD been so delayed in reaching the stores?

Sam : We're waiting until the software is right.

NG : Should Jag have had CD-ROM from outset?

Sam : No. The reason why, in our opinion, is very simple: it's a question of the retail price. What can the consumer buy and afford at the very beginning? We went back to our Commodore 64 experience in the early '80s. If you can buy a machine for $159, and then later buy a CD as an add-on, you can afford it. To have it all in one package at $300 or $400, it's just too expensive.

NG : What percentage of the current Jaguar owners do you see buying the Jaguar CD add-on when it goes on sale?

Sam : Going back again to the Commodore 64 analogy, we found almost 100% percent of Commodore 64 owners bought a floppy disk drive when they were made available, with a lag time of between three and six months. Right now we're expecting that 50% of Jaguar owners will buy CD players. And if it's a higher percentage then, well, great.

NG : Most of the best games on Jaguar at this point have been PC ports, such as Theme Park and Syndicate. But there's nothing that is the equivalent of Sega's Sonic The Hedgehog or Nintendo's Mario. So far Jaguar has failed to produce an...

Sam : ...the icon game, right. Our competitor, 3DO, does not have an icon game. Sony does not have an icon game. But we do think it is a nice thing to have an icon game. We're going to work on two or three different ideas at one time to see which one really takes hold. There's an old coin-op from the old Atari games called Major Havoc. It was a Tempest game from a technology point of view, with vector graphics. The game featured Major Havoc who goes out and saves a space station. He's a very cool character. We're going to modernize him and make him into an Atari character, bring him back from the '80s.

NG : How do you think the quality of Jaguar games compares to those on PlayStation and Saturn?

Sam : Well the Jaguar stuff you see so far is cartridge stuff. And it's hard to compare a cartridge piece of software to a CD piece of software. So it's hard to compare our games that way. From the gameplay point of view, I'll put up our stuff against anything that they have. And our CD stuff will be just as cool as theirs.

NG : Does Atari's history and experience help in game development?

Sam : We are doing Jaguar games now, where the designer looks at the old 2600 game from a gameplay point of view, and says that was a great game to play, now let's make it to our technology. And it's unbelievable comparing the two: it's just day and night, from a graphics point of view. In gameplay, it's very, very similar. It's like going in the movie industry from a black and white silent movie to today's color talking movies. It's the same basic plots, they just look better. Better effects, the style has changed, but they're the same.

NG : In terms of system power, would you acknowledge that Jaguar isn't as powerful as PlayStation or Saturn?

Sam : No. Absolutely not. Jaguar is as powerful, if not more powerful than Saturn. That we are convinced of, from the technology that we've seen.

NG : And do you think that the Jaguar games released so far would support that point of view?

Sam : Absolutely. Alien Vs. Predator, Iron Soldier, and Tempest 2000 -- these are things you couldn't do on any 16-bit machine and Saturn couldn't do them any better then Jaguar can. We've got Tempest 2000 coming out on the PC in the next few months, and what our development has proved is that PC 486s just don't have the horsepower to do what the Jaguar can. The PlayStation, I must say, is a little, little bit more powerful in certain areas -- but not in others -- it's a little bit more stronger machine than Jaguar. A little, little bit. But Jaguar 2 will blow it away.

NG : So by placing the price of the original Jaguar at $149, when the PlayStation and Saturn will be priced at least at $300, there's no acknowledgement that Jaguar is a weaker machine and the others are a leap ahead?

Sam : The others are definitely not a leap ahead. As I said, Saturn is the same, if not even less, technology than Jaguar. PlayStation is a little bit more -- not more technology, but PlayStation does have more memory than Jaguar, it's using more silicon as a solution.

[Great Rumbler]

That interview is seriously amazing.

[Joe Molotov]

64-bits vs. 32-bit and 16-bit competitors. Do the math.

[Shaka Khan]

(Image removed from quote.)

(Image removed from quote.)

(Image removed from quote.)

More screens from Unseen 64:

[Joe Molotov]

But how did they get the lion to wear the suit? Truly a feat only achievable with the power of the Jaguar.

[a slime appears]

I like how Jaguar was going to get a VR Headset.

Jaguar, ahead of it's time

[Joe Molotov]

I like how Jaguar was going to get a VR Headset.

Jaguar, ahead of it's time

In an alternate timeline, we might be playing Doom 4 on the Jaguar 4 with the Oculus Rift right now.

[chronovore]

See if you can get Opera browser running on it.

[benjipwns]

I like how Jaguar was going to get a VR Headset.

Jaguar, ahead of it's time

Sam talked about that too...also:

NG : Can you tell us a little about the Virtual Reality add-on for Jaguar?

Sam : It's developed by Virtuality. It's full motion tracking and stereoscopic display. We've done a lot of study on what is the right VR system, and Virtuality is the best. They know their stuff. They have a lot of experience.

NG : But they've never had to produce a system for a mass market price, they're used to making VR units that cost tens of thousands of dollars...

Sam : They won't be producing it, they're just designing it. We will have a mass manufacturer in Japan, Taiwan, or someone else in south east Asia produce it for us.

NG : And what price do you think constitutes mass market?

Sam : That's a good question. When the final costs come in, we can decide, but I'm hoping that it will be $300 or less for the system.

NG : Sega announced plans to release a low-cost virtual reality system a couple of years ago, but the project was put on ice -- simply because it just couldn't be done, from a price/technology point of view. Then, having been rumored for a long time that Nintendo was working on a Virtual Reality headset, they show Virtual Boy -- which is such a watered-down, poor relation of genuine VR that it's hardly VR at all. Now, if Nintendo can't get it right, how can anyone else get it right?

Sam : I don't think Nintendo is known to be a fantastic hardware company. When have they ever come out with great technology? NES was not a piece of great technology -- it was an 8-bit machine like Atari's 2600. But that's all I can say about our Virtual Reality product right now. If it doesn't work out as we planned, we won't sell it. There's no way: I will not sell it if it's not doing things exactly right.

[Joe Molotov]

Acting like the NES was on par with the 2600 is pretty lol, tho. Has this cat ever even seen a videogame?

[benjipwns]

It was only 8-bit man, DO THE MATH.

Has this cat ever even seen a videogame?

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