10 Most Infamous Unreleased Gaming Consoles

by David Bixenspan

1. Atari Jaguar Duo

Atari

While the spec wars are alive and well, many readers will be too young to remember the bit wars of the early to mid-'90s. X console was better than Y console because it had more bits, even though most gamers had no clue what it actually meant. Truth is, it meant almost nothing. This argument got exposed (and arguably more confusing) by Nintendo's Virtual Boy, as it was a 32-bit system that was sort of halfway between a portable and a console, and it was clearly inferior to 16-bit consoles in many ways.

Atari's Jaguar purported to be the first 64-bit console based on 64-bit graphics accelerators, though it used a 32-bit instruction set. None of it mattered, because it was a flop with a poor library and terrible third party support. Still, with their main competitors (other than Nintendo) being CD-based and the previous generation having a number of CD drive add-ons, they released a CD add-on that ended up having just 11 games released for it.

Despite how pointless it was, like Sega with the CDX and NEC with the TurboDuo before them, Atari got working on a hybrid model that would play all Jaguar games. Even though there was no demand for it. It got as far as Atari manufacturing the plastic cases before someone realized that it wouldn't sell and they cancelled it.

Contributor
Contributor

Formerly the site manager of Cageside Seats and the WWE Team Leader at Bleacher Report, David Bixenspan has been writing professionally about WWE, UFC, and other pop culture since 2009. He's currently WhatCulture's U.S. Editor and also serves as the lead writer of Figure Four Weekly and a monthly contributor to Fighting Spirit Magazine.