Atari strikes back - and out - with the Atari Lynx in September 1989


It’s September, and the goldenrod of late summer is just beginning to yield to the crisp, knowing breath of autumn. But inside the air-conditioned caverns of your local electronics and toy emporiums, a different kind of season is dawning. The season of the Lynx. The Atari Lynx.

Well, it says Atari on the machine and the box. But it's actually from the mind of Epyx, a legendary software developer in the golden age of the Commodore 64. We are entering into the period where Atari is ceasing to develop its own video game hardware, that will culminate in utter 1990s failure. Did you ever hear the tragedy of the Atari Jaguar? I thought not.

The kids in the back of the station wagon, they were the first to see it, to really feel it coming. Not hear it, not just hear the talk on the blacktop or the whispers in the dim-lit aisles of the arcade, but see it. See it in the magazines, glossy and bright, with some kind of advertisement. This Atari Lynx—it wasn't like the others. 

You see, the handheld systems they had before were black and white. All the games, from Tetris to Dr. Mario, were like an old, faded photograph. But the Lynx? The Lynx is color. A real, honest-to-god, backlit color screen. It's like The Wizard of Oz, living in an old movie and suddenly, right there in the palm of your hand, a technicolor dream. You've made it to the Emerald City.

The blood flowing through the digital veins of these tiny cartridges is pure 1980s. Blue Lightning, a jet-fighter frenzy that makes you feel like Maverick on a sugar high; California Games, bringing skateboards and surfboards to your fingertips; Electrocop, a poor-man's Robocop caper with graphic glitz to spare; and Gates of Zendocon, a side-scrolling 1989: A Space Odyssey that blasts you to alien worlds. 

This isn't just a toy; it's a statement. It's Atari roaring back from the wilderness, a defiant shot across the bow against the tide of competitors that had swamped the Kings of Sunnyvale since the mid-80s video game crash.

But there was something wrong. The batteries, for one thing. Six little AA batteries, and they'd choke like a dog. You'd be playing a game, the colors bright and vivid, and then—snap. The life would drain out, the colors would fade to black, and the thing would die in your hands. A cold, heavy brick of dead electronics. A promise broken. And all around you, the kids with the other one, the ugly grey one, were still playing, still getting another turn.

And the games. There weren't enough of them. The other guy had a whole bookstore full, while the Lynx had a little shelf. The loneliness of a console with so much potential but no one to unlock it. 

This was the Atari legacy from the mid-80s to mid-90s. Rejecting offers to brand the Nintendo Famicom and Sega Genesis as Atari machines (Doh!!), but then adopting that very rebadging strategy with clunkers like the Lynx and Jaguar. Always ahead with the technology in its game consoles and computers, as owners of the Atari ST and STacy laptop could attest. But forever falling behind deep-pocketed rivals, having never financially recovered from the post-2600 crash. Zigging when they should have zagged, jumping to a portable instead of a 1989-1990-era 16-bit console with arcade-quality Atari games. 

Because Atari had the games, man - a slew of titles that ruled the late 80s and early 90s arcades: S.T.U.N. Runner, Hard Drivin', Race Drivin', Steel Talons, Cyberball 2072, Hydra, and Pit Fighter. But by the time these showed up on the Lynx, the game was already over. And the amazing 3-D graphics and animation of those titles couldn't be as fully appreciated on that tiny screen, as they would have been on a big screen TV, where they coulda-woulda-shoulda been smoking the NES and Genesis as the 90s dawned. Jaguar would arrive unfashionably late, and just past Atari's dominant arcade era. Now it didn't have the games, much less the big bucks to bankroll the marketing of the hardware, and Super Nintendo was a well-established colossus.

It's a story that’s been told a million times, in a million places. The promising upstart, the shiny new thing, that gets suffocated by the bigger, slower, uglier competition. Lynx was the color screen in a world of grey. The people who bought it loved it. But it didn't matter. The grey brick had all the best stories, and people bought the stories, not the color. So the Lynx just sat there, waiting. And the batteries, they just kept dying. FIZZ! ZAP! POOF!

Location: Sunnyvale, CA, USA

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