The Atari Jaguar's Last Roar

A fascinating piece of video game history, and a look behind the mass-manufacturing curtain

The story I’m going to tell here is a bit of trivia that is known among some video game fans, but I doubt many people outside of that group have ever heard it before. And as far as I was able to tell, nobody has ever told it by centralizing all of the known facts and sourcing every major point. If you have any interest in video game history, and/or in the mass-manufacturing process for consumer goods, you’re going to like this one.

Take a look at this ad for the Imagin HotRod dental camera from, as far as I can tell, the late 1990s, scanned and found at the Internet Archive (and some Reddit threads).

At first I wondered if it was an AI-generated image, but I’m quite sure it’s a real old print ad:

But I said video games. What the heck does a dental camera have to do with video games?

Well, nothing, usually. But look at the memory cartridge slot. A little odd and kind of oversized for the sort of device this is. Why not a stock memory card? The answer is one of the weirdest bits of consumer-product history I’ve ever come across.

The shell of that dental camera is an Atari Jaguar game console shell. And the “memory cartridge” is an Atari Jaguar video game cartridge shell.

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The Jaguar was the last video game console Atari—not exactly the same company as the early-80s Atari—ever made. It was released in November 1993, and was a very early fully 3D-capable console. But it was marketed and supported poorly, difficult to program for, and only ended up with 50 games (plus 13 CD games for a CD add-on unit that did not save the console). The Jaguar only lasted three years before being discontinued and liquidated.

The failure of the Jaguar was basically the end for anything like an Atari that was still continuous with the original firm, which had popularized, if not quite invented, the idea of home video game consoles. Following the discontinuation of the Jaguar, Atari merged with, but in reality was more like acquired by, a hard-drive manufacturer in 1996. The hard drive firm went out of business in 1999, after selling the Atari IP to Hasbro in 1998.

But the dental camera shell.

Amid Atari’s collapse, as the company’s properties were being sold off, they also sold the molds for the Jaguar case and game cartridge to Imagin, the dental camera manufacturer. I don’t think the cost of the molds, for Atari, has been documented, but some folks on a Reddit thread who work in tool-and-die/molding speculate the molds probably cost at least several hundred thousand dollars to produce.

The Imagin HotRod dental camera was not a success and barely launched, but it really exists. Here’s a video from the YouTube channel Retro Game Players, featuring Jesse Perez, who owns an Imagin HotRod:

Perez says a couple of interesting things here: one is that Imagin’s Steve Mortensen only paid $2,000 for the molds! He also says they were minimally altered (the bottom half only). The top was identical, making it suitable as an actual Jaguar console top shell (a little on that below).

Perez also says that Imagin already had a camera housed in a very similar shell. The Jaguar molds were purchased by Imagin in 1997, but that’s also the year the company was founded. If Imagin had already spent money on a shell design, why would they scrap it, even if the former Jaguar shell was a little cooler looking? I also wonder why, exactly, the original Imagin shell is so similar to the Jaguar in the first place—is there an even deeper Jaguar/Imagin design relation there? A little more on that in a video embedded below.

Perez also says that “only about seven” of the cameras were ever actually made, and almost none survive—he owns one of the only existing units (his is a not-for-sale demo unit).

Someone on this Reddit thread presented this photo along with an old, no-longer-readable eBay listing (but you can still view the product image), and this note: “It’s the original Jaguar, at one point there was a huge surplus of the dental camera shells, they have dwindled since then so it’s been harder to find.”

His photo:

Here’s a scan of an old story quoting Mortensen, where he states that Atari was going to scrap the molds, which he values roughly at $250,000. He also states that he’ll produce extra shells for Jaguar collectors, which probably explains why, at one time, these shells were widely available.

And here is a mini documentary about this whole saga, including an interview segment with Imagin’s Steve Mortensen himself. The video also features Jesse Perez, the guest in the video above, who at the time of the video’s production had recently become an Imagin employee doing microelectronics work. (This video’s description also includes a link to an eBay listing for those no-longer-available Jaguar top shells!)

Part of this video is filmed in the Imagin offices, where one of these units along with one of those original Jaguar-like units is still on display. Mortensen has old Atari documents, old stuff from the molding company, and more. This is really cool, and if you’ve liked this story so far, watch the whole thing:

Cool story. Surely the ultimate fate of those molds, and perhaps the molds themselves, is lost to time?

Well. Some of this was noted in the videos, but if you haven’t watched them through, here it is.

It starts with something I found on Reddit, which seems too random yet specific to be made up. This comment is from November 8, 2013:

The picture in that imgur link is, improbably, still there, uploaded the day before:

I obviously couldn’t confirm that this is a real photo and a legit comment, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, and the timeline lines up.

We know Steve/Imagin still had these molds in 2013, because the next transfer is fairly well documented, and is one year after that. Mike Kennedy, a video game enthusiast and businessman who attempted (and failed) to design and release a retro console using the Jaguar shell in the mid-2010s, acquired the molds from Steve Mortensen in 2014.

Look at this bit, from a 2015 interview about Kennedy’s console project, before it was canceled:

That [a 2013 conference] was when I began considering using the Atari Jaguar shell and cartridge tooling that was in the possession of Imagin Systems Corporation. They had purchased the tooling from Atari back in 1998 and had repurposed it as a dental camera. I called Steve Mortensen (President of Imagin Systems) and asked if he still had the molds for sale. After a confirmation, I was on my way up to San Carlos, CA (December 2014) to see them with my own eyes and make him an offer. In the end, I purchased the tooling and had it shipped from San Carlos down to a large injection mold company in Southern California so they are closer to home. The purchasing of the Atari Jaguar tooling was necessary for me to take on such a significant venture. In the end it will have saved us nearly $500M in start-up costs. Of course, RETRO VGS will have entirely new system design and architecture, as well as new classically inspired USB controllers.

$500 million is a lot more than the mid-six-figures guess some folks had. The much higher figure, I’m guessing, includes the entire cost, from design to prototyping to the final molds. It’s also possible the number is inflated, but there’s no doubt that tooling is extremely expensive stuff.)

After Kennedy’s Retro VGS project failed, Kennedy in turn sold the molds, and to a very appropriate person. In an extremely long thread on the gaming website AtariAge from 2016—originally about drama surrounding Kennedy’s fizzled console project—the AtariAge founder and manager, Albert Yarusso, made clear that he now owned the Jaguar case molds!

The “Mike” here is Mike Kennedy, and Albert is Albert Yarusso:

An Atari enthusiast owns the original molds for the final Atari console. A perfect ending for something that easily could have been forgotten, lost, or destroyed.

But even that isn’t quite the end! In 2023, the modern Atari company—again, through a series of tortured corporate moves, not really the same Atari company, but the heir to most of the original company’s IP—acquired the AtariAge site.

As part of that deal, Albert Yarusso became a full-time Atari employee, and assumed “a new role as the company’s internal historian.” So the owner of this piece of wild video game history is now formally the historian for the descendant of the company that made it, all the way back in 1993.

That’s about as close to full circle as you can get.

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Someone in one of the threads I read wondered if, despite playing ball with the Jaguar fans, Imagin’s Steve Mortensen wished he’d never bought the molds, because of the sheer number of Atari-related inquiries he no doubt had to field over the years. It raises a question I think about a lot: how do we know what’s going to be “history”?

At the time, the Jaguar molds seemed like—they were—cast-offs with little value. Nobody in 1996 or 1997 would have imagined what a priceless collectors’ item and piece of gaming history those molds were going to be. The actual consoles were still being deeply discounted and cleared out.

The hunks of metal didn’t change; the way we think about them changed. Or at least enough of us for them to have ended up as they did.

The fact that the molds still exist, and are now, in a way, officially back in the hands of Atari as it exists today, is remarkable. A great deal of corporate and consumer-product history is not preserved, especially when, as with Atari in the late 90s, a company folds or changes hands.

The story of why the tooling changed hands is also worth nothing. As simple as it seems like it might be to fabricate a plastic shell, doing it at scale and at high quality is necessarily expensive.

Here’s a machining company’s basic explanation:

During the injection molding process, plastic pellets are heated to their melting point then injected into a cavity (the mold). As the plastic cools, it hardens into the shape of the cavity to form the part. These molds are subjected to thousands of pounds of pressure every cycle, so they must be made from materials that can withstand repeated use without deforming, typically steel. But no matter how durable the material, injection molds don’t have an infinite lifetime. How many parts a mold can produce before failing depends on the plastic being molded.

Injection molded parts not only have high tooling costs, but they require large lead times as well to create the mold. And once formed, it is very difficult (sometimes impossible) to make changes to these molds. Major design changes halt production as a new tool has to be made.

For a small dental camera company, or a retro console project, acquiring an existing mold is a major logistical and cost savings.

I’ve touched on this tool-and-die issue before, in a piece mainly about a manufacturing issue with Ronzoni’s pastina (tiny stars) pasta from a few years ago, which the company attributed to the difficulty of sourcing dies capable of extruding the tiny pasta. (Substack tells me that piece is my second-most-read ever!)

In that same piece I outlined another interesting story from the world of manufacturing, about the Technics SL-1200 turntable, introduced in 1972 and discontinued in 2010. You might chalk that up to the decline in vinyl sales; 2010 is after the “vinyl boom” started, but not that far after, and Technics couldn’t have known a real resurgence in sales would be coming.

But that wasn’t the primary issue. This was:

Technics discontinued the turntable because the molds and dies used to make the turntable parts were 40 years old and had worn out. (In other words, the machines that made the machines.) Technics redesigned the turntable from scratch a few years later, and one of their people noted that doing this sort of tool-and-die stuff today is much more expensive than it was in the 1970s. Only one mold remained from the old turntable: the dustcover. The new one still uses it.

And an addendum to that: just recently, in November 2025, Technics announced that the SL-1200 line would be discontinued again, this time apparently permanently. From an industry magazine: Technics “will be ending production of the SL-1200/1210G model by the end of the year due to the discontinuation of externally sourced components.”

The 1200 is not their only turntable, and from what I can tell doing a little reading, it’s likely that some of the 2016-era SL-1200 parts are also used in other models. But the point stands that even an iconic product backed by a major company sometimes can’t overcome the vagaries of manufacturing and supply chain problems.

It’s all like looking behind the curtain on something seemingly simple but fascinatingly complex, a whole world hiding in plain site.

It also raises the question of how many other molded shells and casings, or other parts, are “secondhand” like this. Who knows how many everyday products have their own curious backstory or previous life?

That isn’t exactly a hint at my next old-tech deep dive, but, of course, I’d love to find some examples. Until then, I leave you with this fun story of video games, corporate history, and the complexity of mass manufacturing.

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Related Reading:

The Curious Case of the Last Record Changer

We’re Still Making Car Cassette Players

No One Makes *Electronics* Anymore

You Never Know How It Falls Apart

Didn’t Used To Be a Pizza Hut

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