I first became aware of the Jag probably sometime in 1994 when I saw a programme on TV called 'Movies, Games & Videos,' which was (if I remember rightly) a sort of evolution of the ITV Chart Show that featured videogames as well as the music videos of it's forebear. I have a very vague memory of seeing Aliens Vs Predator or DOOM (I can't remember which - I just remember seeing the shotgun being reloaded) and being completely blown away by it. That shotgun animation was quite simply the coolest thing I had ever seen, and I knew that the Mega Drive just wasn't going to cut it anymore. After that brief period amazement and infatuation, I just kind of forgot about the Jaguar and the other new machines because they were unobtainable items to me back then - I was a school kid with a paper round but hardly the kind of capital to throw around on new-fangled hi-tech exotic games machines. About a year after that though, a friend of mine announced that he'd been to a car boot sale or something and that he had a new console. Intrigued, I went around to his house and there it was: an Atari Jaguar.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing - we played DOOM and AvP (this lucky twat had BOTH the games that had shotgun reload animations!!!) and from that moment on I was smitten. That year I got a Sega Saturn for Christmas but I was still really intrigued by the Jaguar, and after much haggling and weeks of mithering, my friend agreed to swap his Jag with DOOM and AvP for my Sega Saturn steering wheel, my copy of International Victory Goal and my Webley .22 air rifle. I had my first Atari Jaguar.
I went on to assemble a fairly decent library of games, including Chequered flag, Iron Soldier, Flashback, Club Drive, Sensible Soccer and Crescent Galaxy. Even though I also had the Sega saturn, the Jag was the machine I played with the most. I had the machine for a few years and then for some reason I didn't have it anymore, and I can't actually remember why! I just remember selling the games through the LOOT free ads paper (I put the advert in there by using my Dreamcast to go online, so that probably illustrates how long I had it!), but what happened to the console is a complete blank!
The second Jaguar I owned came into my possession while I was at University. I was walking through the town centre with a friend when we just happened to go into Electronics Boutique (remember them?!), and what greeted us just inside the entrance but a massive pile of Atari Jaguars! I bought one for £49.99 and got a copy of DOOM with it. That machine I kept throughout my time as a student but found I had to sell it (along with my other consoles) when I graduated so I could afford to buy a suit and some shoes for job interviews!
That was in 2003. The Jaguar I have now I got off eBay a few weeks ago. It was advertised as 'untested,' and is slightly faulty (
I recently started collecting consoles again (my Dreamcast collection is by far the largest, although I also have a 3D0, Mega Drive, Saturn, PlayStation, N64, Gamecube, PS2, Game Boy Advance and Xbox 360), and have been regularly attending car boot sales and flea markets, but retro games are really hard to find in the wild these days. As such, my main hunting ground has been eBay and as I get more Jag games, I'll be adding reviews and gameplay videos to Do The Math.
So that's my potted history with the Jag. If you read all that to the end, fair play to you!
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