Hobby Drama

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/UnderneathAllThe on 2025-01-07 19:30:55+00:00.

Before getting into the drama, if you would like to play this terrible game and other perfectly emulated Atari Jaguar games, The Atari 50 year anniversary game collection is available on all current consoles (and Steam) and has Fight For Life in all of it’s terrible glory.

The first part of this very long post is a rundown of video game consoles in the early to mid 1990’s to better illustrate the whole “Bit-war” craziness of the hobby at the time and how this was relevant to the Atari Jaguar Video Game System. The second part is strictly about the hobby drama with the Atari Jaguar and its flagship (more like “flag shit”) fighting game, Fight For Life.

The early to mid-1990’s were one of the most unique times in video game history. Due to the huge success of the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the 16-bit Sega Genesis, there were many tech companies that tried to capture the success and income of Nintendo and Sega. Sega and Nintendo were the two big dogs of the early to mid 1990’s and their 16-bit consoles were leaps and bounds better than anything from the 1980’s.

The console rush of the early to mid 1990’s mirrored what happened back in the early 1980’s where many companies created failed consoles to match the success of the (barely) 8-bit Atari 2600. This caused the video game crash of 1983 which nearly killed the video game market as a whole until the 1985 8-bit Nintendo NES came out and created a standard for video games and became the standard for what a video game system should offer. Games had to meet a level of quality that was missing from most of the Atari 2600 games which was a huge step forward for video games. While there were some poor NES games, the game library as a whole had many amazing games. Also of note, Sega had an 8-bit Master System that was trounced by Nintendo in the west buy wildly popular in Brazil for some reason.

During the first half of the 1990’s, the key selling point for new gaming systems were how many “bits” they were powered by. The more bits, the better. Higher bit gaming systems could better emulate the arcade games of the era as well as allowing for larger game worlds with higher graphical and sound capabilities. This became a marketing method to determine what system was more powerful and this created the “bit-war” of the 90’s. Below is an example of the advertisements the time:

Also of note, while almost all systems had used video game cartridges in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, there was now a move to CD media for games. This was huge for consoles due to the massive amount of space on CDs for large game worlds, perfect CD audio, and a much cheaper medium to have a game on which resulted in lower prices for games. It did however add load times to games due to the transfer of data being much slower than cartridges.

The following consoles came out in the first half of the 1990’s to compete with the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis and every single one crashed and burned as critical and financial failures:

1. Amiga CD-32 – an odd 32-bit CD system that never made it out of Europe with terrible games, terrible graphic quality, pretty much terrible everything.
2. Panasonic 3DO – a 32-bit CD system released for the insane price of $700 (which is around $1500 today) and allowed anyone to publish games on it which led to many soft-core adult garbage games and a mostly poor library of games.
3. Phillips CD-I – a 32-bit CD “Entertainment platform” that was never meant to be a gaming console, but had the notoriously terrible Zelda and Mario games due to a partnership with Nintendo
4. SNK Neo Geo CD – A 24-bit (?) system that was meant to bring SNK arcade-perfect games in an affordable CD format (the cartridge version of this system came out in the late 80’s and the games were $200 each, which is $450 each in today’s money PER GAME). The problem was that the CD format on the system had horrific load times and the game library was pretty much all 2-D Street Fighter 2 type Fighting games which were losing popularity by the mid-90’s.
5. Sega CD – A Sega made 16-bit Sega Genesis add on that allowed CD games, but suffered from a small overall library of games, of which the majority were of poor quality.
6. Sega 32-X – ANOTHER Sega made 16-bit Genesis add-on, this time a cartridge based 32-bit add on system for the 16-bit Sega Genesis that was again mired by a small library of mediocre games and poor graphic and sound capabilities.
7. Nintendo Virtual Boy – the first “32-bit” portable console, it was a primitive virtual reality headset in 1995 which only had black and red for colors, had less than two dozen games total, and also gave people headaches when they played it for more than 30 minutes.

By 1996, all of these systems were either completely dead or nearing discontinuation.

While Nintendo and Sega would release their new systems in the mid-90’s (The 32-bit Sega Saturn in 1995 and the 64-bit Nintendo 64 in 1996), both were trounced commercially by the 32-bit Sony PlayStation released in 1995 due to the PlayStation making every correct choice possible at the time and not succumbing to key mistakes made by the competition. The PlayStation was affordable, easy to develop for, had incredible 3-D polygon graphics capabilities, had numerous big developers making games for it, and was marketed for adult gamers. Marketing to adults was novel for the time and very successful in making video games a cool hobby for adults and not just a toy for children.

Sega lost their entire American market with the release of the Sega Saturn in 1995 due to abandoning the sports games that made their previous Genesis system so popular in the West, as well as making a video game system that was very difficult to develop for. The aforementioned Sega CD and 32-X made many Sega fans upset that they bought poorly supported Sega systems in the past and were now asked to buy ANOTHER Sega 32-bit system. The biggest issue was that the Sega Saturn struggled with 3-D polygon games and was decimated by the PlayStation due to most gamers wanting to move on from 2-D sprite games to 3-D polygon games.

Nintendo released the 64-bit Nintendo 64 in 1996 much later than the competition. Everything Nintendo released on the system had the bold number of 64 next to it to state that it was much more powerful than the other 32-bit gaming systems. There were games only the N64 could do with massive game worlds that had no loading times due to Nintendo sticking with the cartridge form. Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of time, which are both considered two of the greatest games ever made, took advantage of this strength.

However, the fact that N64 used cartridges made other types of games difficult or flat out impossible on the system. Developer Squaresoft famously moved development of the mega-hit Final Fantasy 7 from the Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation as the game was around 2GB in size and was a three-compact disc game that would have needed the space of 30 N64 cartridges if released on the N64 due to the massive size of the game. Nintendo also struggled with being seen as a children’s toy company compared to the more adult gamer branded PlayStation. In this case, the lines began to blur on the bit-wars due to the 32-bit PlayStation doing much better with games that the N64 struggled with and vice versa.

There was one other “64-bit” system however. The swan song of Atari, who would never make a video game system again after the 1993 release of the disastrous "64-bit" Atari Jaguar.

Atari was the king of video games in the late 1970’s to the early 1980’s with their monumentally successful Atari 2600 console. However, due to a glut of horrible games and terrible versions of arcade games (the awful Pac Man arcade port on the 2600 was a disaster), the Video Game market crashed in 1983 and was revived in 1985 by the aforementioned 8-Bit Nintendo NES system. Atari had a string of failed consoles in the 1980’s that included:

Atari 5200 – a system that was a bit more powerful than the 2600, but had a controller that would break after less than six months of use due to a design flaw that could never be fully repaired.

Atari 7200 – A system to compete with the Nintendo NES, but was laughably less powerful and with a poor library of games.

Atari Lynx – A failed hand-held system that was destroyed by the Nintendo Game Boy.

In 1991, Atari decided to make one last attempt to recapture their glory days in the video game console space and the Atari Jaguar was promoted as the first “64-bit” gaming system. Atari focused its entire 1993 system launch marketing budget to hype up that the system was twice as powerful as the 3DO and four times as powerful as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

Here is a compilation of every commercial from this era by Atari:

The hype was high for the Jaguar. Upon the system launch however, it became clear that the games were not much better graphically than the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, and the overall game design of many of the Jaguar exclusive games were very poor in comparison to the other systems. Here are some examples:

Nintendo’s Star Fox for the Super Nintendo –