Atari Lynx

The first colour handheld, designed at Epyx and sold by Atari, beaten by a monochrome Game Boy

Shut down
19902026

The Atari Lynx was a handheld console designed at Epyx as the Handy and released by Atari in September 1989 at $179.99, the first handheld with a colour backlit LCD. It could link up to eight players and flip for left-handed play, and had California Games, Blue Lightning and Chip's Challenge at launch. A smaller Lynx II followed in 1991 at $99. Overshadowed by the Game Boy, it was discontinued in 1995 as Atari turned to the Jaguar.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1989
  2. 7 January 1989 other
    Handy shown at CES

    Atari picks up the Epyx design.

  3. September 1989 Launch
    Lynx launches

    $179.99, first in New York; the first colour handheld.

  4. 1991
  5. July 1991 Version
    Lynx II

    Smaller, $99, better battery life.

  6. 1993
  7. 23 November 1993 Decline
    Atari launches the Jaguar

    The Lynx loses what attention it had.

  8. 1995
  9. 1995 Shutdown
    Discontinued

    Telegames sells off the remaining stock.

The site through time

Browse atari.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Atari Corporation 1989–1995 Founded Designed at Epyx as the Handy; Atari bought the design in 1989

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Atari wound the Lynx down in 1994 and 1995 to put everything behind the Jaguar, after six years in which it never got close to the Game Boy. Its backlit colour screen made it expensive at $179.99 and hungry for batteries, Atari struggled to get it into shops, and third parties mostly stayed away; the cheaper, smaller Lynx II of 1991 did not change that. Estimates of lifetime sales run from under two million to about three million.

Our analysis: The Lynx was the first handheld with a colour, backlit screen, hardware sprite scaling and eight-player linking, designed by the people who had built the Amiga. It lost for the same reasons the Game Gear lost a year later: price, battery life and a company that could not fund a library. Atari also launched it against Nintendo's Tetris bundle in the same season, and no amount of hardware won that argument.

History [edit]

The Handy

Epyx, the Californian software house behind Summer Games and Impossible Mission, hired Amiga designers Dave Needle and R. J. Mical in 1987 to build a handheld, codenamed Handy. It had a 3.5-inch backlit colour LCD, a 16 MHz 65C02 processor with custom chips for scaling and distortion effects, a ComLynx cable for up to eight players, and a symmetrical body that could be flipped for left-handers. Epyx ran out of money before it could ship and sold the design to Atari, which showed it at CES in January 1989 and released it, as the Lynx, in September 1989 at $179.99, initially only in New York and then nationwide by year end. Nintendo's Game Boy, monochrome, $89.99 and bundled with Tetris, had launched a few weeks earlier.

The launch games were California Games, Blue Lightning, Chip's Challenge and Gates of Zendocon, and the machine had a genuinely good arcade library over the years: Klax, Rampart, Toki, S.T.U.N. Runner, Rygar, Ninja Gaiden. What it did not have was many of them, or reliable distribution; Atari, run by the Tramiels, had poor relations with retailers, and six AA batteries lasted four or five hours.

Lynx II and the fade

The Lynx II, released in July 1991 at $99, was smaller, lighter and had a power-saving mode and rubber grips, and Atari advertised it aggressively against the Game Boy and the new Sega Game Gear. Sales still lagged far behind both. From 1993 Atari's attention went entirely to the Jaguar; the last officially released Lynx games came in 1994 and 1995 and the console was discontinued in 1995, with lifetime sales estimated at somewhere under three million. Telegames sold off stock and released a few titles afterwards, and a homebrew scene has kept new cartridges coming ever since.

The domain today

atari.com is the current Atari SA, which markets Lynx games only in compilations such as Atari 50.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Atari Lynx history AtariAge 1 January 2000 [archived]
  2. Lynx from Atari (1989) Toy Tales 6 September 2022 [archived]
  3. Chasing phantoms: the history of failed consoles GamesRadar 15 July 2013 [archived]
  4. Atari Lynx: the world's first colour handheld Time Extension 1 September 2023

Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).