This week marks the 20th anniversary of the release of the Atari Jaguar in San Francisco and New York City.

Last year I wrote about Christmas 1993 when my parents surprised me and my brothers with an Atari Jaguar. Because the Jaguar wasn’t available nationwide yet, my parents teamed up with an uncle in California to obtain it.

In the 20 years since then, I sold or gave away all my other old Ataris — the 2600, 800, 130XE, 520ST and 1040STe — though I wish I still had all of them.

But the Jaguar remains — and it has new life because my kids now enjoy it.

Here’s a look back at this console that meant so much to us.

The legacy

My brothers and I were familiar with the popular consoles of the day. We spent many afternoons in the basement of our neighbor friend’s house, playing Super Mario Brothers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among others. There were long sessions of SMB3 in my friend John’s living room. And I remember a birthday sleepover at a classmate’s house where we played the then-new Super Nintendo late into the night.

But my family never owned anything popular — or current. All our computer equipment had been hand-me-downs from relatives, several years out of date.

We never had anything state-of-the-art — until the Jaguar.

So we played it all the time. We also talked about it to friends. It was an underdog system, and we were the only ones we knew who had one. Unfortunately, that never really changed because the system didn’t sell well.

And that leads us to the console’s main issue: games.

The Jaguar’s library was fairly weak. The system was capable of so much more, but since it didn’t sell well, there was never a solid ecosystem of developers. No games that truly pushed the machine to its limits.

But we were kids. And we were happy with what we had. Here’s what I remember about some of our early experiences with the Jaguar’s games.

The pack-in, Cybermorph, was a simple but fun flight game. Your “T-griffon” ship is transported to different planets where you blow up bad guys and rescue yellow pods. The graphics were impressive at the time — A world built of 3D polygons, with Gourad shading to smooth it all out. The worlds were wide-open, and I thought it was cool that I could fly anywhere, unlike other space games where the player is restricted to a particular path.

I spent a lot of time with Cybermorph, and was able to beat it eventually. But I never warmed to our second Jaguar game, Trevor McFur and the Crescent Galaxy.

This is kind of surprising, because I was generally like sci-fi and space games. Trevor McFur was a sidescroller, in the vein of Defender or R-type. But I thought the visuals were kind of corny, and didn’t care for the the music or sound effects.

It was exciting to see occasional Jaguar TV commercials and big write-ups in gaming magazines. Atari was in the news! It was like a miracle after years of obscurity.

Still, we weren’t big spenders. We subsisted on this meager diet of games until 1994, when we got Tempest 2000, one of the best titles ever made for the Jaguar. Everything about it is awesome from the techno soundtrack to the smooth gameplay to the beautiful graphics. The bursts of colorful pixels as you earn power-ups, the trippy way visuals melt and blur away. I spent hours and hours whirling around webs.

Over the next two years we finally diversified beyond space games. Troy Aikman Football, NBA Jam, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, and Syndicate. Each of these was loved and well-played at our house.

And after Atari finally folded up shop, we got a last load of games: Alien vs. Predator, Defender 2000, Hover Strike, and Flip-Out. Because we got these so late, I never got far into any of them, though AvP and Defender 2000 are particularly strong games.

When the late 1990s rolled around, I was at college. I was working on Macs at school, and eventually bought an iMac. I spent less time on our Atari computers and the Jaguar. Eventually the Jaguar ended up with my brother Justin when he lived in another town.

Rediscovery

My brother had the Jaguar for most of the 2000s before giving it back to me a couple years ago. For a while it stayed in its box, but occasionally I would take it out and play. This past year, I took it out and installed it permanently in the basement. I also ordered a custom-built S-Video cable to get a better picture.

My kids love to play it, particularly my oldest (Jadzia) and youngest (Joseph). Their favorite games are NBA Jam, Tempest 2000, Cybermorph, and Defender 2000.

Joseph is nuts about the space games. It’s been interesting to watch the way he incorporates aspects of all three space games into his own imaginative play. I was too old to have done that as a teen, but Joseph is just 3 and a half.

Joseph is particularly into Defender 2000 right now, a fast-paced side-scrolling space shooter. So much so that he even makes up songs about it.

I dismissed Defender 2000 when I first tried it in the late 1990s, because it was so fast. I was familiar with the Atari 8-bit version of Defender, but with the Jaguar version, I found I couldn’t control the ship at such high speeds, and frequently crashed into bad guys.

In trying it again with Joseph this year, I have come to realize I was playing it wrong. One day Joseph started beating levels (mostly by accident) and even got himself onto the high-score list. I was surprised, and tried playing it again myself. That’s when I realized you are not meant to hold down the left- and right-arrow controls. What’s needed are occasional taps, so that you keep a slower, more manageable speed. After that I, too, started beating levels and making progress. It’s a fun game, with great effects and music.

There are a number of Jag games I’ve never tried, that I’d like to obtain: Rayman, Bubsy, Myst, and Battlemorph are high on the list. We’ll see what the future brings.

Over the last year I’ve exposed my kids to more retro-computing stuff than ever before. My daughter has learned how to BBS, they’ve watched me play SunDog in an Atari ST emulator, and they’ve embraced the Jaguar.

It’s not that we’ve rejected modernity. No, they’re familiar with games like “Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” or “Machinarium” on the Mac, or “Bumpy Road” or “Real Racing” on the iPad.

But some things stand the test of time.