Atari Lynx Review

Put a Lynx next to a Game Boy in 1989 and Atari looks like it won. The screen is color and it is lit, the custom Suzy chip scales and rotates sprites in hardware, and the whole machine can be turned upside down so a left handed player gets the stick on the correct side. Blue Lightning throws a scaled mountain range at you. Klax and Chip's Challenge look and sound better here than they did on any rival portable.

None of it mattered. The Lynx is the size of a hardback, it drinks six AA batteries in about four hours, and Atari asked $179 for it against a Game Boy at $89 that ran most of a week on four. The real loss was software. Nintendo had Tetris and a licensing operation that tied publishers to it; Atari had California Games in the box and a library that never reached a hundred titles, a good share of them conversions of arcade cabinets already five years old.

The 1991 revision shrank the shell and added a switch to kill the backlight, which fixes the second most serious problem. Collectors love it and they are not wrong: this is the most capable portable of the early nineties, designed at Epyx by people who understood what they were doing, and then bought and mispriced by a company that did not. Pick one up to see where the money went. Do not pick one up expecting an evening's entertainment.