Atari's Fall

Since its release at the end of 1993, two full years had passed, and Atari Jaguar's cumulative sales in the North American market had frozen at 125,000 units.

Correspondingly, 100,000 units sat piled up in Atari's warehouses.

"125,000." Nakayama Takuya read out the figure and shook his head. "That's not even a fraction of Jupiter's new installations over the past two months. This machine is completely beyond saving."

"Apparently, Atari's board has already issued a resolution." Hisao Oguchi reported the latest developments. "They'll halt Jaguar production and sales this year and completely shut down their hardware business. Their only job after that will be figuring out how to dispose of those 100,000 units of inventory."

With 100,000 unsellable consoles, the warehousing fees alone were no small expense.

From a business standpoint, this was no longer a bad asset, but a pure liability.

"How are they going to dispose of them?" Nakayama Takuya tossed the fax onto the table. "They can't possibly find another desert to bury them in, can they? Back then, Alamogordo landfill in New Mexico buried over a million E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial cartridges. Is there still room there to bury 100,000 consoles?"

Hisao Oguchi was amused by the dark joke. "According to news from North America, Atari intends to package the machines and sell them to liquidation companies. The price has been driven extremely low—not even one-tenth of the cost price. They'll probably end up as cheap electronic toys, flowing into the secondhand market or third-world countries."

A pioneering brand that had created the home console industry had fallen to the point of being sold as scrap metal by the pound.

Nakayama Takuya leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped before him.

At last year's E3, Atari's product manager had worn a black T-shirt with a smashed-pot-no-turning-back