The Atari Lynx: What could have been

        
The Atari Lynx was released in 1989, and at first it looked like it would have a legitimate chance at challenging Nintendo's Game Boy for handheld console supremacy in the US. It was capable of displaying full color much richer than the Game Boy's black and green palette, it was twice as powerful as Nintendo's console, and since it was an Atari product, home translations of popular arcade titles like Hard Drivin' and Paperboy were a given. At the same time, the odds were stacked against the Lynx in many ways from the time of its release. In this post I'll look a bit at how and why the Lynx failed, but most of my time will be spent focusing on a few key mistakes Atari made which, if rectified, could have led to the Lynx being very successful in the North American market. I'm not even going to speculate about Japan, Nintendo was going to be king there regardless.

The Lynx actually began life as a prototype called the "Handy" developed by a company called Epyx. Like Atari, they had a propensity for coming up with really cool ideas, but displaying some ineptitude when it came to their finances. They started developing computer games back in the late '70s, when some of them still came on cassettes. Epyx then hit it big in the early '80s with an RPG called Temple of Apshai, released right around the same time as a title called Akalabeth which would go on to spawn the famed Ultima series.

I've never played the game myself, but according to reviews from the era it compared favorably to Akalabeth, and it succeeded in making Epyx one of the more prominent names in the software business back in its infancy. After making a decent amount of money thanks to Temple of Apshai, Epyx continued to have success in the nascent PC game market. Their next big hit was the primitive platformer Jumpman, and they followed that up with Summer Games in 1984, which capitalized on the popularity of the Los Angeles Olympics and was their most successful release to date. It was available for pretty much every personal computer and console under the Sun in those days, but soon after the release of Summer Games, Epyx made the classic mistake so many software companies make, and got into hardware. Their first forays were in the long forgotten realm of interactive VHS games. Like "virtual reality", this was one of many video game crazes of the '80s and '90s which never really lived up to the hype and has since faded away.

The Handy was their next project and it could have been a doozy if it had dropped back in '86 or '87. It's technical specs blew away non-portable consoles of the '80s like the NES and Sega Master System, but because of stunts like their ill-fated series of interactive VHS games, they lacked the funding to finance the Handy alone. Enter Atari. The former giant of the video game industry had recently been surpassed in the market by Nintendo and Nolan Bushnell, who'd started the company, had left to run hundreds of Chuck E. Cheese franchises. Their own Atari 7800 home console was performing dismally compared to Nintendo's NES, and under the former head of Commodore, Jack Tramiel, Atari had been focusing more on the PC market than the video game market. Tramiel and co. were obviously impressed enough by the Lynx's potential to throw their weight behind it in spite of their lack of faith in Atari's other video game ventures, and it was released in Christmas of 1989, about three years after Epyx had presented their initial prototype. So what went wrong?

There are several major reasons the Lynx was unable to compete with the Game Boy in the long run.

Lack of exclusive marquee software: While the Lynx did receive home translations of many Atari arcade hits, so did the NES, Sega Genesis, DOS, early Windows editions and just about every device the Lynx was competing with. As an added handicap, Atari itself had never really succeeded in developing iconic franchise characters like the Mario Bros. They also failed to capitalize on some of the most iconic franchises they had at their disposal. The only game in the Gauntlet series for the Lynx is Gauntlet: The Third Encounter, an Epyx-developed dungeon crawler featuring classes such as Android, Pirate and Nerd:

                                                           
The title really had nothing to do with the Gauntlet series until Atari decided to slap the license on it, and it's all but forgotten today.

The huge delay between its prototype and release stages: Atari acquired the rights to distribute the Lynx back in 1984, and then dithered around for about two years before releasing it. Had it been released in '87 or even 1988, it would've been the first 16-bit console to hit the US market, handheld or otherwise. Instead, by the time of its release, the Lynx was competing not only with the NES, but also the Sega Genesis and NEC's Turbografx-16. Atari lacked both the marketing muscle and, as mentioned above, must-have software, to compete in this environment.

Atari never really cared about the Lynx in the first place: When the Lynx finally hit the stores in 1989, Atari was already busy talking to former members of the Sinclair computer company's development team about releasing a home console based around a chipset dubbed "The Panther". By around Christmas of '91, they'd decided to throw in the towel and concede defeat to the Game Boy juggernaut, and Lynx releases slowed to a trickle from then on. Atari always seemed to look at the Lynx as this fun little project they were throwing money at, rather than a product that could have helped revive the flagging fortunes of their home console business. First with the Panther (later abandoned to the netherealm of unreleased "vaporware") and again with their Jaguar console, they always seemed to have other projects on their plate which were viewed as more important.

It was just too damn big to be truly portable: The kid in the Lynx commercial I posted at the beginning of the blog is able to fit his Lynx into his jeans pocket and hide it from his teacher. This was not something successfully accomplished by even one person in real life. If the Lynx had been released in the late '90s when me and all my school chums thought those hideous Jnco jeans with pockets large enough to fit a lunch box inside were cool, then maybe fitting it inside of your back pocket would have been feasible. In reality, the Lynx was hardly "portable" compared to the Game Boy.

Despite its failings, I do have a bit of a soft spot for the Lynx. I own one, and even though it's one of my lesser played consoles, it does have some titles which I feel stand out:
STUN Runner-The crown jewel of Lynx arcade ports, it blows away anything on the NES graphically:

Ninja Gaiden -The game is a direct arcade port which differs significantly from the NES game of the same name. I wouldn't say it's better than the NES game by any means, but it is definitely easier. A port of Ninja Gaiden 3 which mimics the NES version more adeptly is also out there, but it was a rush job released near the end of the Lynx's lifespan and not nearly as good as this one in my opinion.

And lastly, Robo Squash, the Pong game of the future:

Until next time, keep your heads up