Welcome to the jungle
Atari planned to come back into the marketplace in a big way during the 16-bit era. In order to compete on multiple fronts, they developed hardware to compete in the handheld and home console markets at the same time. Each piece of hardware was codenamed after jungle cats – the Lynx, the Panther and the Jaguar.
Clearly, things did not quite go to plan. The Lynx released as expected but didn’t have the impact that Atari had hoped. Atari skipped the Panther entirely and released the Jaguar instead. So what happened to the Panther?
Atari’s plan for the ‘jungle cats’ had potential, but suffered from poor timing between releases and indecisiveness on behalf of Atari management.
