Justin

hi @RickR yeah! the cassette games were great, many times you could break into them and list out the source code and learn about them. but yeah that’s how they made a profit they didn’t have the huge numbers atari had and that’s how they remained in business. if you want to get in there and make a big library of games that give you some sort of cash flow you just have to do things like that, ziploc baggies and very inexpensive packaging is just the only way you could do it.

hi and thanks @Sabertooth that's a great great question! you just opened a pandoras box and gave me inspiration for my next two Blog posts which will answer your question in detail, and also go in to jack tramiel's sale of Atari through JTS to hasbro and how that all tied back to the Jaguar sales numbers and to what degree the Jaguar was a success or a failure.
and I should warn you: my answers to this question are seen as "controversial". you might not like my answers. you might debate and disagree with my answers. you might think I'm flat-out wrong. and that's okay if you do. all I can tell you is what Jack Tramiel told me and others at Atari, and what Atari was telling me directly. I have to go by my own first hand experiences with Atari and answer as best I can, and 
your question is a really good one @Sabertooth and I will answer it in much more detail in my next Blog posts. for now let me answer them as directly and to the point as I can:
 
I don't know the answer to this for sure. The faxes from Atari stopped coming in just prior to the release of Jaguar. By the time the Jag came along Atari wasn't as adamant about sharing some of this sales information, but I did get it from time to time. Atari had made $50 million in profit and it was mostly off games, they made almost no profit off hardware.
I don’t know what the production/sales rule was for the Jaguar. They never told me about that. I’m pretty sure it was 100,000 units per game on the Atari Lynx, at least in 1989-1991. I remember some numbers like 45,000 units to 50,000 units on some Lynx games.
But the Jaguar was a whole different story. They were very quiet about that machine. I mean VERY quiet. It was like pulling teeth getting information about it. And the reason why my own personal opinion was Jack Tramiel was getting ready to retire was that if the Jaguar didn’t go he was getting ready to pull the plug. He could’ve sold the company but if they looked into his past business practices they may have been very leery of buying the company, he may not have been able to sell it. We'll get into that theory later in another Blog.
 
See @Sabertooth you're onto something. I don't think those sales numbers are accurate. That's not to say that you're wrong. I just don't think those sales numbers or that "150,000 Jaguars" sales figure that's been reported out there is accurate. At all. I think it's much higher than that worldwide, and I'll tell you why
 
Yes. That's the number I have too, I think that number is probably right. 
Let's look at this scenario in context. When I was receiving their sales history, a game like Crystal Castles on XE would be made 100,000 at a time and sell out. These XE games were made to work on all 64k Atari computer systems, and when combined with the XEGS itself was a huge user base. In the many many many millions of systems. So Atari would release 64k Crystal Castles for The Atari 8-bit family and they sold 99,993 units of XE Crystal Castles. They had 7 left.
So think of that with Alien vs. Predator, 85,000 units were sold, but on an installed user base of 150,000 consoles worldwide? That doesn't add up to me. Let's do+the=math. To get that number on Crystal Castles you’d have to have big sales on a huge installed user base. None of that ever made sense to me because A.) Atari was consistently telling me there were 2 million Jaguar units but they did not tell me if that was the United States, or Europe or worldwide, and B.) because some of the Jaguar games sold really well, and that takes a large enough user base.
That’s another thing that’s wrong but I can’t refute it because I was told personally that they moved 2 million units. There were 2 million Jaguars sold. Now, I said that about the Atari Lynx and I got shot down and called a liar. I believe there were actually somewhere around 10 million Lynx units sold world wide. There was even a programmer at Atari who did a Lynx game who said that’s not true. If you go on the Atari Lynx Wikipedia page it says that there were rumors that there’re 6-8 maybe 10 million units sold worldwide. That’s what I believe to be true, because I had insider information and that's what Atari was telling me personally.
I truly believe there are more Atari Jaguar units worldwide than officially documented. Certainly more than that 150,000. 
You see Jack would run these machines through other countries so he didn’t have to pay taxes on them. And he would say "yeah we sold 1 million units in the US" and that’s what Atari would report to the IRS and that's all they paid taxes on. Privately Atari would tell us there were more units offshore. That's how there are all these XE machines down in Mexico that are being sold on eBay and re-imported to the US.
This stuff got shipped off shore pronto and then sold in other countries and that’s how Jack Tramiel evaded taxes, allegedly. That’s not what they told me, Atari told me flat out there were 2 million Jaguar systems. If you think about it 85,000 AVP that’s a lot of one title for such a small user base. Doesn’t that seem awfully odd to you?
 
@Justin now we're getting into it arent we? They only sold worldwide 900 Fight for Lifes. The company that did Ultra Vortek was in Salt Lake City. They told me they did fairly well with that game so the sales numbers were actually pretty good! It was Fight for Life was what triggered things. After Ted Hoff was fired by Jack Tramiel Atari went 5 whole months without releasing a Jaguar game. Ted Hoff came to work in January of that year and he was locked out of the building.  A lot of us who were still in the Atari business were so dismayed by this. Because there were a lot of games still in the hopper! 
What Ted Hoff did was reorganize the company and he paid off all the back bills, and Ted had gotten Atari quite profitable because he was keeping things on pace with a release schedule. That gave retailers confidence in the life of the system and in Atari's consistency and business practices, it helped their reputation. Ted Hoff had gotten Atari onto a regular release basis as far as games are concerned, you could see what was coming out. Jaguar was selling in Walmart at this point. They were getting 1-2 games a month on the Jaguar which was phenomenal compared to Jack Tramiel. Some of them were done real well. And even though they didn’t sell like AVP they did sell, and many of them did sell good enough. Ted Hoff had resurrected The Atari Lynx too. The Lynx games started selling again because Lynx had a huge installed user base and it never should’ve been done away with.
Well once Ted Hoff was fired and kicked to the curb, I called up Atari right way because I had a feeling of what was going on, and I said are you going stick to your release schedule because it was working. I warned Atari that if they abandoned their release schedule and abandoned their dealers, the dealers would abandon Atari. This is what had happened after the crash. “Well were’ looking things over and deciding what we’re going to do” and I warned them that if they didn’t keep to the schedule they were going to loose whatever ted Hoff had built up, and I knew it was good because Atari had $50 million in the bank and there was a lot of profit.
5 months go by and no new releases from Atari. So they brought out Fight for Life and released it after 5 months had gone by without a peep from Atari to their dealers. Atari called me a few days later and they were just steaming about it and they said you were right. I got a phone call from Atari one day and they said "Lance you were absolutely right that we should have stuck to the release schedule or people would abandon us." And I said that was their past record, that Atari didn't talk to people, they didn't communicate with their dealers or with distributors or buyers for retail stores like Toys R Us, KB or Babbages, nobody had any idea what was going on, they don’t care about support, and when Atari brings stuff out a lot of times it doesn’t sell because they don’t support it.
They only sold worldwide 900 Fight for Lifes. And my order was for 55 of them. Atari said I placed the largest order in the world for fight for life. Right after that they merged with JTS that hard drive maker in India. And that’s all she wrote.

@Sabertooth I was just about to ask @Video 61 a similar question. Lance has told me before that he saw sales figures for Jaguar games, and I think it was Fight for Life or Ultra Vortek had only manufactured, or only sold somewhere around 6,000 cartridges. I see in his Blog post Lance is talking about faxes from 1985-1990, mainly 2600/7800 and 8-Bit computers, with the Lynx towards the end. I think we all have a sense that the Jaguar was likely a different story with numbers closer to what Lance was talking about with Activision. Makes me wonder if Atari made any money on the Jaguar at all. 

@Video 61 This is really good advice for indie developers and the entire homebrew market - especially right now as we move toward an unknown future. I hope everyone developing new games for retro platforms will give your Blog a read. Including the most loved homebrew guys, and new Atari themselves.
"Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
Lance, I said in your status update that this is an epic win for the entire Atari community - worldwide - to have you Blogging. I've known a number of people who worked at Atari, both under Warner and under Tramiel - programmers, execs, MBA types, designers - but none of them in that building were ever on the ground selling Atari games and systems at a retail level, let alone still doing it today after almost 40 years. You have such a unique story and experience - so much knowledge and stories and legends - that all needs to be shared.
I'm so grateful you're here posting and interacting with the community. Atari users worldwide will benefit from this, and I will make sure that these Blogs and your knowledge stays online and gets passed on long after we're all gone. We're all so glad you're here doing this 

Very cool item @RickR! Now that I see this I remember selling these Nyko cases at Toys R Us during the Game Boy Color era. When I first saw it in your post I thought it was a TurboGrafx-16 Turbo Booster Plus, and remembered these cases always used to remind me of those even when they were new.

I'm really surprised to hear you say that 😱 It's hard to be inside The World of Atari for 30 years and not have heard of Crossbow. Give the 7800 version a play and let us know your thoughts on how they compare.
 
Same here! I might be a bit partial to the Atari 7800 in general, but I always preferred that version. Then again I usually prefer most 7800 versions to the XE / 8-Bit with the exception of Karateka.
 

Same here, this blog post is awesome.  I remember riding my bike to a computer store as a kid.  I was a VIC-20 owner at the time, not yet Atari.  And I was astounded at all the games available on tape in a ziploc baggie!  I think I bought a few that looked like fun, but was pretty disappointed with them when I got home and tried them.  Well, the good news was that my disappointment turned into "I could do this better".  And the best thing about tape games was you could actually see the source code.  So I ended up learning a ton. 

Great info as always @Video 61 I always love reading about your tales from the trenches. 😉 I remember the days of ziploc backs pinned to the board at the computer store too with a photocopied sheet with a 5.25" floppy in there. I really lilke your packaging. 🙂 It's unique and fun. 

@Video 61 This is really good advice for indie developers and the entire homebrew market - especially right now as we move toward an unknown future. I hope everyone developing new games for retro platforms will give your Blog a read. Including the most loved homebrew guys, and new Atari themselves.
"Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
Lance, I said in your status update that this is an epic win for the entire Atari community - worldwide - to have you Blogging. I've known a number of people who worked at Atari, both under Warner and under Tramiel - programmers, execs, MBA types, designers - but none of them in that building were ever on the ground selling Atari games and systems at a retail level, let alone still doing it today after almost 40 years. You have such a unique story and experience - so much knowledge and stories and legends - that all needs to be shared.
I'm so grateful you're here posting and interacting with the community. Atari users worldwide will benefit from this, and I will make sure that these Blogs and your knowledge stays online and gets passed on long after we're all gone. We're all so glad you're here doing this 

@Sabertooth I was just about to ask @Video 61 a similar question. Lance has told me before that he saw sales figures for Jaguar games, and I think it was Fight for Life or Ultra Vortek had only manufactured, or only sold somewhere around 6,000 cartridges. I see in his Blog post Lance is talking about faxes from 1985-1990, mainly 2600/7800 and 8-Bit computers, with the Lynx towards the end. I think we all have a sense that the Jaguar was likely a different story with numbers closer to what Lance was talking about with Activision. Makes me wonder if Atari made any money on the Jaguar at all. 

@Sabertooth I was just about to ask @Video 61 a similar question. Lance has told me before that he saw sales figures for Jaguar games, and I think it was Fight for Life or Ultra Vortek had only manufactured, or only sold somewhere around 6,000 cartridges. I see in his Blog post Lance is talking about faxes from 1985-1990, mainly 2600/7800 and 8-Bit computers, with the Lynx towards the end. I think we all have a sense that the Jaguar was likely a different story with numbers closer to what Lance was talking about with Activision. Makes me wonder if Atari made any money on the Jaguar at all. 

Thanks for sharing these fantastic insights! I wonder if the 100k rule held true for Atari under Sam during the Jaguar's run? With such a limited installed user base, that's nearly a 70 percent attach rate for each sold out title based on 150,000 Jaguars sold during its commercial life. I've read AVP was the best seller at 85K.

@Video 61 This is really good advice for indie developers and the entire homebrew market - especially right now as we move toward an unknown future. I hope everyone developing new games for retro platforms will give your Blog a read. Including the most loved homebrew guys, and new Atari themselves.
"Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
Lance, I said in your status update that this is an epic win for the entire Atari community - worldwide - to have you Blogging. I've known a number of people who worked at Atari, both under Warner and under Tramiel - programmers, execs, MBA types, designers - but none of them in that building were ever on the ground selling Atari games and systems at a retail level, let alone still doing it today after almost 40 years. You have such a unique story and experience - so much knowledge and stories and legends - that all needs to be shared.
I'm so grateful you're here posting and interacting with the community. Atari users worldwide will benefit from this, and I will make sure that these Blogs and your knowledge stays online and gets passed on long after we're all gone. We're all so glad you're here doing this 

The Tower of Gaming!  That looks really good!

I love this picture of you holding the colecovisison joystick!

Welcome @Video 61! THRILLED to have you sharing your stories and experience in the Blogs!

ANY game with a real-looking crossbow controller was going to get some serious attention from us kids!  Lets be honest, the games with sweet custom controls were the best games of all.  Sit-down Pole Position, Battlezone with two sticks and the periscope, Stunt Cycle, even Tron with its black-light enhanced controls.....
 

I will have to find it for the 7800.  So far I love the game.  But, it's true, Crossbow I have never heard of until I started collecting video games a decade ago.

Crazy, the actual arcade cabinet was semi common when I was kid and I always drawn to it. And you know it was different because games like Operation Wolf and the later other Gun games never interested me, but anytime I saw a Crossbow cabinet I had to play and see how far I could get my friends. But like all arcade games back then, it was much more difficult than home versions and I think I was only able to get them to the ice caves before getting wiped out. Might have made it to the jungle screen, but again just way more difficult compared to the home versions.
So yeah, I was very familiar with the game and it was actually Crossbow and Xenophobe that made me want a 7800 when I was younger in the late 80s. I never was able to get Xenophobe as I don't remember being able to find it, but I remember seeing it on the Sears wish catalogs back then. But Crossbow I was able to get and I'm pretty sure I got it from Toys R Us at that time.
 

I'm really surprised to hear you say that 😱 It's hard to be inside The World of Atari for 30 years and not have heard of Crossbow. Give the 7800 version a play and let us know your thoughts on how they compare.
 
Same here! I might be a bit partial to the Atari 7800 in general, but I always preferred that version. Then again I usually prefer most 7800 versions to the XE / 8-Bit with the exception of Karateka.
 

I'm really surprised to hear you say that 😱 It's hard to be inside The World of Atari for 30 years and not have heard of Crossbow. Give the 7800 version a play and let us know your thoughts on how they compare.
 
Same here! I might be a bit partial to the Atari 7800 in general, but I always preferred that version. Then again I usually prefer most 7800 versions to the XE / 8-Bit with the exception of Karateka.
 

I might be a bit partial to this game myself...hehe. Only I play the 7800 version which, I find to be smoother game play overall.
 

I'll have to hunt that one down.

Oh I was advised by a few others in the modding scene to just replace it and keep it to myself. But I don't see any value in hiding such a mistake. And in this case, it was easily avoided but also something very easy for anyone to do. 
But sure, I could have just replaced out the board and let it go and none including the client would have been any wiser. But that isn't how I do things. I take it for what it was, a mistake and valuable lesson to be learned from the mistake I made in this case. And yes I let the owner of this console know what happened.
 

Honesty is a virtue.  Thank you for sharing.  It's true we all make goofs like this.  It's just a matter of time.