The Lynx offers a color handheld screen at a steep cost

What happened

Two former Amiga engineers, working at the software house Epyx, built a handheld that was genuinely ambitious: a backlit color screen, hardware that could scale and distort sprites for pseudo-three-dimensional effects, and a connector that allowed several units to be linked for the same game. The case could even be held either way round to suit left-handed players. Epyx ran into financial trouble before it could manufacture at scale, and Atari acquired the design and brought it to market.

Against Nintendo's grey monochrome box the specifications looked decisive, and they were not. The unit was large, expensive and drank six batteries in a few hours, which mattered more to parents than color did. Atari, by then a much diminished company, could not attract the publishers needed to fill a catalog, and the games that did appear were too few to build momentum. A smaller revision followed, but the audience had already settled elsewhere.

The world at the time

Portable gaming had suddenly become a contested market, with Nintendo, Sega and Atari all fielding cartridge handhelds within about a year. Color liquid-crystal panels were expensive and power-hungry. Atari's console business had never recovered from the collapse earlier in the decade, and the company was operating on far thinner resources than its rivals.

What it changed

The system remained a niche product with a small devoted following and an active hobbyist scene, and it was among Atari's last significant hardware efforts before the company left the market. Its lesson was absorbed slowly, since backlit color handhelds only became viable once components improved enough to run for hours, which took another decade.