Cojag

The Atari CoJag taught players several important things: aliens are far less intimidating when you’ve got a light gun in each hand, hard drives belonged inside arcade cabinets long before they were standard in living rooms, and a commercially troubled console could still go out in a blaze of gunfire.

More importantly, the CoJag gave the Atari Jaguar a second life in the arcade. Released in 1995 by Atari Games, then a subsidiary of Time Warner Interactive that licensed the console hardware, the board was built around the Jaguar chipset. It wasn’t a straight copy, though: Atari swapped the Jaguar’s standard 13.825 MHz Motorola 68000 for either a 25 MHz Motorola 68020 or a 33 MHz MIPS R3000, increased the RAM, and widened the ROM bus from 32-bit to 64-bit. Games ran from a hard drive alongside a JAMMA wiring harness, and the board could handle two light guns rather than the Jaguar’s one.

Whether it was Area 51 sending players through waves of mutated soldiers or Maximum Force turning terrorist takedowns into a frantic shooting gallery, the CoJag made its name with fast, gritty light-gun action. Only two games, plus their combination cabinet, were officially released, with Area 51/Maximum Force Duo bringing both games together in a single machine. Several prototypes, including Freeze, also exist, while unmodified boards found an unexpected side job powering Carousel International kiddie rides once spotted in Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. The following chart visualises the growth of the CoJag library and how it was distributed across regions throughout the system’s lifespan.