The Martlet

My last column featured a failed video-game system called the TurboGrafx-16. Now I’d like to talk about another spectacular failure in the world of video games, but this time in the world of handheld gaming — Atari’s Lynx.

Atari was the original king of the home video gaming market in the late ’70s and early ’80s with its 2600 game console. But a series of spectacular business failures, including the mountain of unsold E.T. The Extraterrestrial game cartridges that was notoriously buried in the New Mexico desert, led to the end of Atari’s successful reign. A crash in the home video-game market followed, lasting until the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 1980s.

But their earlier failures weren’t quite the end for Atari. In 1989, they released the Lynx, a spectacular hand-held system upon which the weakened video-game company placed hopes for a revival in its fortunes. Released in North America at about the same time as Nintendo’s Game Boy handheld, the Lynx featured technological advantages that not only put it in another league than the limited Game Boy system, but made it comparable to the powerful (at the time) Sega Genesis and Super NES game systems.

While the Game Boy games were in only one colour and suffered from a non-backlit screen, the Lynx had a huge colour palette to work with, a backlit screen for playing in dark rooms, and an advanced graphics engine. The Lynx was also able to enjoy a solid library of games, with a unique look resembling the webcomic Diesel Sweeties.

It was able to draw upon a number of Atari-produced arcade hits that could be imported to the handheld system’s smaller screen while retaining their visual quality. Other games produced specifically for the Lynx showed impressive graphics, solid game play and innovative design.

So how could such a system fail? Part of it could have been the Lynx’s bulky size, price and low battery life, three features where the Game Boy had an advantage.

Ultimately, the Lynx’s failure was due to poor marketing. Nintendo’s Game Boy had a vast library of games and was readily available in stores, particularly during the all-important holiday seasons. In contrast, it was difficult to find anywhere that sold the Lynx, and hard to find new games.

Atari’s struggling game system also faced the catch-22 position of not being able to sell systems because of a lack of games, but not being able to attract third-party game developers to make games because of the system’s poor sales.

By the mid-’90s, Atari abandoned the Lynx, but the system retains a strong retro gamer fan base. With a solid lineup of classic games such as RoadBlasters, Blue Lightning, Klax, Hard Drivin’ and ElectroCop, it’s not hard to see why.

Ultimately, the Lynx deserved to fare much better than it did in the marketplace.