10 Unreleased Video Game Consoles You Never Knew Existed

Atari were once the biggest name in console gaming, so it seems almost impossible to believe that they never released a 16-bit console to succeed the best selling 2600 and 7800 systems.

However, the truth is that they very much planned to, in the form of the Atari Panther: a state-of-the-art 16-bit console based around the powerful Motorola 68000 CPU, that could also be found in systems such as the Mega Drive, Amiga, Apple Mac, and indeed, their own ST computer.

The key to the Panther was in its custom chips. Alongside Otis (a 32 channel sound processor) was the Blossom video chip, which boasted 262,144 colours and almost limitless sprites. It’s fair to say that it was vastly more powerful than both the SNES and Mega Drive, which would have been its rivals.

In the end, Atari cancelled the Panther just after development kits had been sent out to various publishers. This was because they decided that their other console project, the Jaguar, which was planned to come out three years after the Panther, was progressing faster than expected. Sadly, the Jaguar ended up experiencing numerous delays due to the complexity of the hardware, leaving the Panther as possibly the biggest missed opportunity in console history.