Awesome!
All the way back in Fall months of 1989, The Atari Corporation dropped a bomb on the gaming world.
At the time, the most powerful, and compact game machine around. The Lynx! The incredible piece of
kit had 16 bit graphics and a full color screen! 16-bit graphics were only seen in the Sega Genesis
and NEC TurboGrafx-16. Both of which were also brand new, but also huge machines. In the portable
space, the Nintendo GameBoy, also released in the same time frame, paled in comparison,
with a screen that only showed 4 shades of green. To have any kind of game on the go was impressive
but for a lot of us, once we saw the full color future, the Lynx promised, we never looked back.
The birth of the Lynx goes back to 1987. When two of designers of the Amiga computer,
RJ Mical and Dave Needle joined publisher Epyx, to work under another Amiga designer,
David Morse. The goal was to create the most power portable game machine possible.
Delivering not only a color screen, but a 4096 possible colors, with 16 on each
scan line. The screen lit up, so you wouldn’t need to be directly under a source of light.
The display was also kind of letterboxed. Not 16:9 but not square like a TV either. The graphics
allowed for scaling sprites and pseudo 3D tricks most games on the TV in 1989 couldn’t pull off.
That display could also be flipped upside down for players who want to play “left handed” The
sound chip was very impressive, allowing for clear, digitized speech in many games. 8 players
could connect and play together. Development of future games would be easy, as the same guys
who made the Lynx knew the Amiga inside and out, allowing for games to be made on that computer.
What the team of RJ, Dave and David created, they called the Handy Game,
and began to shop it around. Meeting with Nintendo and Sega, who declined to pick it up,
for obvious reasons that we all know now. Atari eventually became the buyer,
and rebranded the machine the Lynx, in reference to its multi player capability of “linking up”
which also started the short lived trend of Atari naming all their gaming hardware after cats.
All that power Epyx put into the Lynx did come at a price. It was expensive. The Lynx debuted
with a price tag of $179. Double that of the Game Boy and almost as expensive as the Genesis!
That set did come with California Games, and an AC adapter, though.
The price was later cut to $149 for the deluxe set and just $99 for the Lynx only.
Not only was the Lynx expensive, all those advanced parts were difficult to make,
with early units in short supply.
In 1989, The GameBoy won the Christmas season over the Lynx walking away.
When Atari-developed games began to be released starting in 1990, some really high quality titles
hit the stores, many based on popular arcade games. The problem was that compared to Nintendo
it just wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. Third party publishers skipped over the Lynx and
if they left the Nintendo-sphere at all, they went to the Sega Game Gear, which after Christmas ’91,
took the #2 spot from Atari. To reduce costs even further, a new design was released,
smaller and lighter, with the option of turning off the display, while the game was still running,
saving battery life, while the new design increased overall battery life,
from 4 hours up to 5. Not to mention playing with headphones gave the player full stereo sound.
You would actually be hard-pressed to awful games in the Lynx’s library. Comparing them to games
of today isn’t fair but considering what the machine could do and what games were back then,
most of them were great! And there were games with recognizable names. Double Dragon,
Ninja Gaiden, Paperboy, and Pit Fighter were well known to outsiders, giving Atari,
some gravitas and showing that the library, however small, wasn’t full of no-name games.
In 1992, Atari finally put a real effort into the
Lynx. Lynx commercials began appearing on TV again, for the first time since 1989. Some of
those ads promoted the newest Lynx game, based on the new blockbuster movie, Batman Returns,
and just like Super Mario and Sonic before it, was given away to new owners that Christmas season.
All seemed well going into 1993, but Atari suddenly reversed course on the Lynx to put all
of its efforts behind the 64-bit Jaguar. Atari released only 7 games in 1993. Mail order game
distributor Telegames picked up the slack issuing several titles that year, keeping things alive,
though just barely. Atari released only 2 more games, both in 1995 and then pulled the
plug on the Lynx, cutting the price to $49 and giving away multiple games with each unit sold,
until all remaining stock was cleared out. Telegames released a handful of games after this,
while enthusiasts would self releas titles after the Age of Atari.
The Lynx may not have had the successes that GameBoy and GameGear had,
but sold somewhere north of 3 million units. And had 76 games released over all.
Its worth noting that the Lynx was sold in Japan from 1989-1991.
And among classic game enthusiasts there, is still remembered, and held in high regard.
And while we all remember the Atari Portfolio making a cameo in Terminator 2,
the Lynx did get some screen time in its hey day,
being featured in the epic early Fox TV show Parker Lewis Can’t Lose!
Of Course if you had your Swatches synchronized at 7:30 every Sunday, you already knew that.
Life after the Lynx saw RJ and Dave team up once more to develop the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer.
Starting work on it right after handing the Lynx off to Atari.
No one really knows what 3DO was supposed to mean but since that,
the Amiga and Lynx were all made by the same guys, it might mean 3rd Development Order, who knows?
The Lynx did have one more day in the sun when select Lynx games appeared in Atari 50:
The Anniversary Celebration, released in 2022. Making these games and many
others from the Atari era playable on modern hardware for the first time since the 90s.
And on a final note, The Lynx’s legacy lives on in EVERY portable game machine that came afterwards
(except the turbo express) as the Game Gear, WonderSwan, Playstation Portable, DS,
Steam Deck and everything in-between adopted the horizontal layout designed all those years ago….