The Lynx was a really interesting piece of hardware, as a kid I really wanted it. It just released during a time where Nintendo was absolutely dominating the gaming space at least in the states, and it was maybe too ambitious for its own good. The Nintendo strategy of using lesser tech to its full potential converted to really great portable games on par w/ the NES, much better battery life, and lower costs. And as stated when you have SHELVES of Gameboy stuff and a small Lynx section, you're gonna naturally drift to the one with more games. On top of that, by the late 80s, Atari was kind of a tainted brand name after the crash and TWO failed 2600 follow ups. Its similar to Sega by the late 90s where they went from being a powerhouse with arcade stuff and the Genesis to spending the rest of the 90s tripping over their own dicks with the Sega CD, 32X and Saturn. By the time the Dreamcast hit, no one had faith in the brand anymore, so a legit good product died.

Atari proved themselves the kings of shooting themselves in the foot with their terrible decisions.

Atari Lynx uses a 65C02 CPU which is an 8 bit processor. Atari Lynx model 2 also last around an hour extra on batteries. I bought two Atari Lynx model 2 handheld consoles. Not long after release in the UK. One of my then workmates had brought an Atari Lynx model 1, into work to show me it working. I liked what i saw mostly but thought it was a bit large. I also saw the Nintendo Game Boy working ,and was far less impressed with that handheld console. Yes the Atari Lynx was pretty expensive to run on just batteries. But having bought two, i was prepared to buy several sets of AA NiCad batteries. And four AA chargers, i had 24 rechargeable batteries in all. Which took 2 hours to charge a set of 4. The Atari Lynx was a darn good piece of hardware for its time. I have very good memories of my days with my Atari Lynx 2 models.

Big ups including our hometown hero and the ribbons of shame scene as well! I had a lynx, loved it. never took it out much but was always plugged into the wall.

So one of the reasons that the old handhelds like the game gear, nomad, or Lynx have abysmal battery life is the backlight. Those old consoles use a mini fluorescent bulb behind the screen, and it kills the battery. White LED's hadn't been invented til the mid 90's, and doing a modern mod with led's gives them triple the battery.

It was over before it began. Tetris was pretty much the ultimate pack-in game for a gaming system.

Battlewheels was an awesome multiplayer game.

Good video. I like Lynx, specially Ninja Gaiden port. The shmups are good with the vertical screen mode. Greetings from Brazil, friend!

I remember. I was a teen. Lynx looked.great. Price was nuts though. A lot of us wanted one.

As a Gameboy owner of the 90’s, and knowing the history of the Atari Lynx, it came down to Ataris bad marketing and high price point of the system, $179.99 was a lot of money to throw at a device like this when in the early 90’s there weren’t any cell phones to buy and home computers were still fairly new on the market, and the most expensive electronics in homes in the 90’s were usually a TV and VCR, and not much else. So a pricey gaming handheld for a kid was a hard pill to swallow for parents to consider buying plus the price of games. A Gameboy was far more affordable even a Sega Game Gear. And for $179 that would easily buy a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis, so it was far more reasonable to put the money towards those than the Lynx.

and the develop platform for the lynx was an Amiga not Atari ST

Friend of mine had a lynx, I couldn't stand playing it. It had the same issue the GB had, a screen that had ghosting issues. Now we have better screens. Terrible back then though.

Why is it that everyone that comes up with an idea, started out drawing it on a napkin?

The tramiels could run anything into the ground

The tragic thing about the Lynx to me is that those specs, and what it could do with them, still put many later handhelds to shame, such as the Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket and Gameboy Color. If the Lynx had been given another chance with the NGPC's screen and size, I wouldn't have hesitated to get one. I'm not surprised that the Lynx did a bit better in Europe. The video game crash was a US-only thing, and at that time Atari and especially Sega were better known than Nintendo here. But the GameBoy did quickly change that. For me the question is, even as a Sega fan at the time, how did the Lynx get beaten by the Game Gear, even though the Game Gear had the same weight and battery consumption problems and was noticeably weaker on the graphics and audio side?

Was the Lynx a wasted opportunity for Atari, or was the market just not ready for another Atari product?

I'm among those who appreciate this underrated console. I ended up finding one at a local Charity Shop a decade ago. It was in good condition, in a carrying case with two games. And for $5AU, that's money well spent, given the price it goes for nowadays.

As always, extremely high-quality video with lots of interesting historical facts! Congrats!

My brother had one. IMO it was a great gaming platform, but it had few decent games available. It also was too big for portable gaming and the screen was too small to make best use of the hardware.

Neo Geo never had an issue of limited games - it was a super premium system with high value games. Each game was like £500. It was not a system you bought many games for like Game Boy. It was for very rich consumers to play literal arcade games at home. The reference to Neo Geo here came across as REALLY ignorant. I can tell you are a kid but you should educate yourself before dropping references in.

The power of Lynx is crazy. Going back to it now blows your mind, being superior in a lot of ways to home systems of the time.

This is the classic handheld million dollar question. Why didn't better systems do better against the interior Game Boy? Many reasons. Name brand being one. 80's and early 90's were name brand driven. Kids went nuts over anything Nintendo, even if it was inferior. Second, a legacy of games! Nintendo was well established in US markets by 89'. Who wouldn't want to play metriod, Mario on a portable system?, cool! Third) the resilience of the GB was second to none. Kids could beat the crap out of it and it would still work. Consume fewer batteries. There is a Game Boy that survived a blast during Desert Storm in NYC on display that still works. Lol that good old Japanese quality! These in my opinion are the biggest reasons. As I keep on saying, jist because a console "lost" a gaming generation certainly does not mean there aren't great experiences on loser system. The Lynx has plenty of good to decent games, some were real lookers! I was blown away when I got mine in 90' scaling and rotation on a handheld! It was more powerful than my Genesis back home...well in some ways...Lynx is a cool system and deserves more respect than it gets.

Epyx had some really big plans for 1988. They started a "home productivity division". and ere looking at doing animation, 3-D CAD, home buisness type software. Then Christmas 1988 hit. During the year, software chain stores proliferated. They ordered much more software then could ever be sold. After Christmas EA had to take back over 50,000 units of unsold software. Things gradually started to pick up, but Epyx dropped the home productivity stuff to save money. But they were still owed some $4,000,000 from other dealers that got stuck with too much inventory and too few customers. Atari's late payments on the Lynx was just another factor leading to negative cash flow.

For anyone wondering how the kid in the Lynx TV advert is supposed to plug the unit into a power socket, in a bathroom stall... What's shown is the comLynx cable. They're doing the surfing duel option in Californa Games. Apparently there's a longer version of the commercial out there where more kids are in other stalls playing along,

As a kid, I wanted one too, because through magazines seeing the graphics 😂 , but personaly much years later, I tried several games and the gameplay...meuh

Actual sales figures for the system will always be a subject of pure conjecture. I think the best approach is that used in Karl Morris's excellent book on the Atari Lynx.. Pete Mortimer of Telegames interviewed. He again makes clear there were never any official total Lynx sales figures given by Atari, he personally thinks sales might of been near the high end 3 million claim, but doesn't even have software sales figures for their own titles on Lynx. Would be difficult to find actual number, but thinks it might be around 200,000.. Sure, we've seen magazines like Retrogamer run figures like 3,000 units sold, as FACT, when it's really just speculation and best guessing from Atari UK's Darryl Still, but as any credible historian will tell you, you never use single sources. It's been documented time and time again, Atari were loathe to release actual sales figures for hardware. The Lynx was no exception.

It's the weight and battery life that got it. 4 - 6 hours is optimistic. Colour LCDs require a white backlight, and the only white lights back then were incandescent or fluorescent. No white LEDs. The backlight is also why the Lynx is so thick, if you've ever taken one apart. It failed because of it's screen. But the hardware had powerful sprite scaling, it was very decent hardware. If they'd released it to work with TVs, it might have done well as a normal console. They'd have to increase the resolution a bit but that's no problem, could still have worked with all the excellent custom hardware. But a colour handheld before the invention of white LED backlights, no chance, never. Not without a backpack and a lead-acid motorbike battery to keep it powered.

I use my Atari Lynx with rechargeable Ni-Mh AA batteries. It is the right way to use an Atari Lynx. Amazon Basics rechargeable AA batteries are a good match for Atari Lynx, Sega GameGear, PC Engine GT, Sega Nomad. I use a Duracell charger.

I would buy the Nintendo Virtual Boy for best intentions, right? :)

I bought an Atari lynx 2 years ago and daaang that thing is so fun! I wish the library is larger

I would choose the one with the longer battery life of course. Sure, the Lynx is better specced in most areas, but it's heavy and a battery guzzler. Battery wise... as a kid I got burned by the OG Game Gear experience (my parents found it too expensive to be buying 6 batteries multiple times a week. Ofc I own a Game Gear now as an adult, but it has a IPS screen, USB-C recharging and 15 to 20 hours battery life with a battery mod. Weight wise, I recently went for a Switch, because I seen a lot of complaints about the Steam Deck being big and heavy. And I don't want to be carrying a brick around with me.

4:12 Lmao, wtf did I just watch...? if that teacher had walked in on the kid 30 seconds earlier, that would've been some f'd up sounds he would've heard coming from the bathroom stall...

Me, my mom, & 2 best friends all bought Atari Lynx units. My mom played hers a lot.

Amazing for the time, but size was a problem; you could go surfing with the Lynx.

From the Time Extension interview.. Lawrence Siegel: The Lynx was a fabulous little handheld. The problem was Nintendo wouldn’t let any of their third-party people come and do software. If you made software for the Game Boy or the Nintendo system you couldn’t put it on anybody else’s system. Sega had some of the Japanese publishers. Nintendo had the rest. And we had none. And in those days, the Japanese publishers ran the roost. So we had this really cool colour item that was just a vastly superior item and it was relatively inexpensive. But I just couldn’t get any software for it and the Lynx failed because almost every piece of software for the Lynx I made in my office in Chicago. I don’t think we had half a dozen third-party publishers that might have made a few titles here and a few titles there. Nobody was able to make any titles for it. Every single one of those games I executive produced and it’s terrible

That ending was *chef kiss*

Omg... the PS-VITA!... how could I forget that somehow disposable smartphones existed back in the early 90s and took market share away from the Lynx... lmao.

0:27 Those last 2 stats are the real deal breaker when it comes to handheld. Lynx is DOUBLE+ the weight AND your popping new batteries at least once a day. Not saying your average consumer took that in to consideration. The main reason is G A M E S.

Jack Tramiel's Atari was not the same Atari that went through the crash of '83-'84. Most consumer's never even knew there was a crash.

The battery life was the killer. Rechargeable batteries existed but were expensive and not as reliable as they are today 30 years ago. So, for every 4-6 hours of gameplay on the Lynx (if you weren't plugged in) youre looking at a few bucks for 6 new batteries. The GameBoy lasted easily 4-5 times longer on 1/3rd of the batteries. Handhelds were largely marketed to kids back then, and kids dont necessarily have an endless supply of batteries or money for more all the time. Top that off with the Tetris pack in and the price point and it was over before it began.

The weakest consoles sold most usually. Gameboy, SNES, PS1, PS2, DS, Wii, Switch. Lynx could run Amiga 500 games portable, but also had that extra "Mode 7 chip". Today we can play Lynx games "portable" on PC handhelds...

It's wrong to say there were no commercial Adventure Games released on the Lynx. Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure was a Medicore affair, pulling in scores of:40% from Games-X and 14% from ST Format here in the UK. Reviewers found it dull and tedious to play. Dracula The Undead was a slow and plodding, but very atmospheric Point And Click Adventure, but if it's creators are to be believed, suffered badly at the hands of Atari.. Jim Gregory: This is one of life's huge annoyances. Dracula was originally a full interpretation of the book with ALL the story - right up to the end. It was designed to be in a larger cart and have a higher price. A full time team of artists, musicians, and programmers had spent over a year honing a great adventure with many unique aspects. When Atari started to feel the financial pinch, they insisted on us chopping it down to fit in the smallest cart size. That meant stripping down the story to end as he escapes from the castle. The final cart only has about 10% of the game, because it still needed the overhead of the adventure engine that we had written. There were loads of beautiful Victorian street scenes, animations, and interiors that had to be tossed. It was so sad. There were three other adventure games that we had pitched to use the same engine that were abandoned, too. One was based upon zombies, but Atari told us that people were not going to be interested in zombies! Remember, this was WAY before all the zombie stuff came out. We developed many other games that never saw the light of day due to the cutbacks and a new manager that was hired, who was technically and commercially 'stupid'.

I used to have a Lynx and several games (about 15 or so), I even had one of the official rechargable battery packs you clipped on your belt (The Gameboy and Game gear also had their own versions). It was a pretty cool system, but I agree lack of software and battery life killed it. I played my Gameboy the most BECAUSE it had the most games and most of those games were pretty FUN. (I did love Xenophobe on the Lynx, and Warbirds though)

Had a Lynx 2 back in the day it was a really decent piece of kit, the frustration was the complete lack of games. I think Atari as a brand was dead and 3rd party developers had lost faith. These were the very early years of the internet, you had to rely on the countless magazines for info. It's a shame such a brand went down the pan, it's only now you see where Atari went so wrong

The Lynx was far superior, except for it's battery life and larger physical size. The idea was more that it's portable and you can take it places, then plug in. And on a longer trip you could splurge and buy batteries and have something to do. I think the main reason the Gameboy did a lot better with greatly inferior hardware was marketing and the lower price. Nintendo since the NES times was all about making games for........little kids. It was mostly parents buying the Gameboy for their kids, not the game players choosing their console. It was cheap, they were all over the place, and Nintendo at that time made lots of games that keep kids busy and out of trouble. The Lynx appealed much more to the older gamer. The young adult that grew up with arcade machines & Atari, or the older teen. But at that time sadly it wasn't enough. Nintendo in their early days through Donkey Kong made the kinds of games (like Space Firebird) that would appeal to arcade fans & those that grew up with Atari, but by the NES, the focus changed to little kids and I found their kind of games very unappealing as an older teen when it came to America. How many games did we really need? Were most people going to buy more than 79 titles? What mattered was.....the tiles available and how good they were. I grew up going to the arcades and still loved them, although that great run was ending as "karate-cades" were starting to take over and I had no interest in them. Awesome titles were made for the Lynx. Many Atari Games arcade hits, which were just awesome games. Sadly that Atari, closer to the original Atari, had nothing to do with the Atari producing & marketing the Lynx, but they did get the rights to a lot of great games. I'd say exactly the ones I wanted, and they'd have been terrible on the Gameboy. One can't blame the Lynx development team for not wanting to do business with that version of Atari. All the original Atari people were long gone, and the ruthless people from the original Commodore were running the company. They didn't care about anyone. The Amiga was incredible when it came out, and to have some of those people working on a portable game system was just amazing, and some of the Amiga game titles. Why play Lynx games on the original hardware when you can play it through emulation? Good question. I'll take......emulation. Sold my original model Lynx just a few years ago. I still have some boxed games for sale. The nostalgia was in the ability to play the games for me, not in the physical console or it's packaging.

I remember my friend had the lynx, it was ok but no games so..... Thanks for the video 👍🏼

atari had no money. no games i owned one and a great handheld. but same as jaguar atari had burned all bridges by then

Bummer! A lot more could've been done with the hardware especially the powerful sprite engine.

Game Boy was a garbage system that unfortunately got all the 3rd party support. I was a kid back then, and thought the game boy screen was trash. Had I known the Lynx, or GG existed in the early 90's, I would have wanted them instead. Jack Tramiel was hated in the industry, so maybe developers didn't want to deal with him.

I remember when these first came out in Canada back in 1991 when I was 10. They were technically impressive, however, it was very expensive and quickly overtaken by the Game Gear and you never heard about it again.

Atari Uk's Darryl Still joins Telegames Pete Mortimer, pointing out nobody really knew actual Lynx sales figures.. : Q. Do you happen to know what the total sales figures for the Lynx were? There seems to be no other figures quoted other than articles that report Atari selling their one millionth Lynx. A) I probably knew at the time, but cannot put a figure on it now. Less than it should have been, that’s for sure. Definitely more than that the worldwide build was 7 digits and they'd have all been sold into retail. He was then given a suggested number, he simply went along with.. Q. I always guessed at about 2.5 million because I know Batman Returns helped sell a lot of Lynxes. A) Yes, something like that.

Time and time again do many companies trying to chase a trend fail to realize, great stats and tech don't guarantee great sales, look at the Game Gear from Sega. Great games, is what sell consoles. Companies today still aren't learning from this lesson, like Chris Roberts and his train wreck of a game called Star Citizen, bragging about a $50 million dollar state of the art motion capture studio and over a billions of polygons in a single pebble, and absolutely no fun gameplay to sell it.

Are you sure about the Lynx's 32-bit DAC for sound? Nobody, not even crazy hifi nuts, use 32 bits for sound, it's completely unnecessary, and the surrounding components wouldn't be able to keep up with the ridiculous Signal to Noise Ratio. Is there some special mode where you can hook up 4 x 8-bit DACs or something? Even then you'd likely hook it into being 2 x 16-bit, not 1 x 32-bit. It's insane, self-defeating, and wouldn't serve a purpose.

Interestingly, the Lynx was originally planned to load games from cassette tape. That's one reason it has so much RAM. If they'd gone with that, games could have been much, much cheaper to make, and independent companies might have chosen to develop for it. Of course fitting in a tape mech, and having it be reliable, would be a challenge in itself. I think both options would have been good together. Carts for travel, but also the option to connect up a tape player, maybe a walkman, to load games up too. Could have allowed for so many more games and much cheaper. That might even have driven sales of the console, having budget games for just a few quid. It's why 8-bit computers did so well in Europe, where for some reason disk drives were horribly over-priced compared to the USA. Even though American computers took 40 minutes to load from tape, British computers did it in 3 or 4 minutes, using ordinary cassette players rather than custom ones made for the computer. That American computers took so long was just laziness by the designers, not imagining that tapes would be an important medium.

Terrific video, the only reason any console or handheld fails is because of the lack of good games

4:16 - where did he plug this in, in a toilet?

This video takes a rather simplified approach. You don't mention the Lynx had the lowest screen resolution of the Lynx, Game Gear and Game Boy, nor how the Lynx suffered when it came to 2D platform titles 15-20 fps for games like Toki, Switchblade II, Viking Child VS 60 fps for Game Gear titles like Lion King and Dynamite Headdy You also don't factor in cartridge sizes when talking about software, the Tramiel's only granted larger sizes when prices fell and even then, wouldn't pay developers more for bigger games. Why do you think APB is missing the Prisoner Confession stage? Shadow Of The Beast the flying sequence? Ninja Gaiden the Arcade intro and an entire level? Lynx Californa Games lacks 2 events compared to the C64 version. Lynx Double Dragon is missing moves, weapons etc. Viking Child lacks the in-game music the GB version has.. So much software on Lynx is scaled down. Regarding Software Development : Your talking a company which delayed the first milestone payment to John Carmack for Lynx Wolfienstien 3D, so John killed the project.. A company which didn't want Mortal Kombat on the Lynx as they had Pitfighter.. A company which didn't class the development of KEY titles such as AVP, Cabal, 720,Rolling Thunder and Indicators as a top priority.. A company unwilling to pay for the licence for Elite, after HMS gave them a demo proving the game was possible on the Lynx, who had them hide the solid 3D,more ambitious version of Battlezone 2000 as an Easter Egg.. A company who didn't want Jeff Minter's Defender 2 on the system. If you talk to publishers like Gremlin, the Lynx games they did release (Switchblade 2) sold so badly, they simply dropped the system.

You can't get blood from a rock on the ground.

I actually had one of those I had a ton of fun with it but I had to rechargeable battery bundle so I didn't have that problem the big problem that I had with it was no games oh and r o g stands for Republic of gamers not whatever you said near the end of the video

nintendo also had exclusivity with game makers and i am sure that went for the game boy as well so that's how the software dominated.

The Lynx really didn't fare well when it came to RPG Games. Knight Technologies "Storm over Doria" was a victim.. Eye Of The Beholder also.. Imagitec Design's extremely flawed attempt at doing an Ultima-Beater, Daemonsgate was canned, but that might of been for the best, given how it was recieved on PC, falling way short of the hype made the hat trick.

I've heard that Nintendo's contracts didn't allow third party developers to also release games on rivalling platforms, so that surely didn't help with the amount of available games.

Toby McGwire fan of the lynx

Nice ending!

If the Atari Lynx had a better screen it would have been a perfect handheld.

There is one lesson tech history has taught us the past 50 years. The platforms that succeeded had a killer app.

I am concerned about your background music, not sure if Nintendo will be pleased

Great video, I shared it with The Atari Network community discord server.

Haha low battery!

Hobrew home grown games are saving atari lynx!!!

Did anyone get a handy from their mum for Christmas? 😂

It sold better over here … u must mean South America right…. No wait… Canada… no wait… Vietnam… what country do you mean… you are assuming we know where u live….

Is that Toby maguire playing the lynx in the bathroom

Atari did not crash the industry, in fact the industry did not really crash at all.

Your comparisons are just misinformation and highly arrogantly IGNORANT af and perhaps also somewhat entitled into the delusional belief that seems typical for Atari fanboys to believe that "Atari should have won" and that they "were unfairly denied videogame software support because of Nintendo". I also have a sneaking suspicion that you most likely didn't exist back then or maybe you was a really young child incapable of making work income based purchases or even of shoveling snow, mowing lawns and selling newspapers as most early teenage boys were able to do especially when videogames started becoming far more worthy and worthwhile to be a hobby than even the early 80s. I can see this by your ignorance of bringing SNK's NeoGeo AES into your blog about the Atari Lynx and also relying on using actual Atari Corp television advertising as some type of "legitimate" evidence that Atari and or Atari Lynx was a cool brand to buy or even worth buying. Advertising and television commercials in the early ages of the 80s and even early 90s could give an image of ok this migjt be interesting to a horrible reputation for using a certain type of mindset that could give your product a bad image. Let's remind everyone here that "Atari Games" and "Atari Corp" were two different entities and companies that catered to very different business or markets. Atari Games was specifically an arcade game maker that was not related, didn't have to answer to or bend the knee to and most importantly were not obligated to serve Atari Corp which had a different owner and different mindset the moment said new owners took ownership of that particular company. Next that tv commercial is problematic because a videogame product that just came out and retailed for $179.99 is being advertised as a videogame that you could sneak into what seems like elementary school and rest room to basically skip class with... I'm sure they broadcast this on American television without thinking about consequences because they figured that the parents might not be sitting there also watching television... so that kinda writes it's own story right there and these types of commercials always suffered (as well as the comparison advertising which Sega and Atari desperately tried using) from potentially sparking a feeling or even sentiment in the viewer (target audience kids) that might not really even fit the so called focus group testing and could become a problem for the way the target audience would see the game product in general. In other words, they could have made a more informative TV commercial that didn't rely in calling kids stupid, pretty sure about that. Next is the so called game software support... we have dramatically different prices here... because of the dramatically different specs... Atari Corp in the late 80s and early 90s just had their own line of thinking that was based on how they originally ignored the home videogame system market after they wrecked it with a bad reputation in 1983. In other words Atari Corp was more devoted to selling computers or rather their computers because that's what they believed in so they basically laughed at Nintendo and Sega and when the numbers came out that Nintendo was doing very well then all of a sudden they wanted to be back in that market and undercut the other n00b Sega at the time which they actually succeeded at. The point is that they had a particular mindset and a way they treated the technology and target audience that they never noticed wasn't sitting well... they had the Atari 7800 which also boasted 2600 BC but your TV commercial was about the 2600 Junior... ever wonder why the heck did they ever think that was a good idea? And they had the Atari EXGS with a commercial mocking the Nintendo NES as some silly children toy (calling an audience dumb is a type of condéscending insult) all between 1986 to 1988 so no wonder those Epyx engineers who created the Lynx didn't want to be associated with Atari Corp... I'd even bet that if Coleco or some other company had signed up that they would never have left because they got a bad feeling but let's not curse Atari Corp cause that's not my intention. My point is that no matter how cool the new Atari Lynx would have seemed in 1989 that the way Atari Corp marketed it would give it either an ok image or a slightly negative or suspect image... The battery life is actually irrelevant here btw even when comparing to the Nintendo Gameboy... Atari Corp had it's own brand recognition just as equally as Nintendo had and Sega was developing. As such the ultimate judge of how a game product will do is after all I mentioned that how would the audience respond to it... it was very obvious that the tv commercial did show Atari Lynx had color screen and stereo sound and ehh more buttons while Gameboy didn't. The first two years will sell a certain amount of units, after that the company needs to keep cultivating interest as well as games themselves... therefore it is NOT fair and is highly insulting to compare the entire run of Atari Lynx to the entire run of Gameboy... it's pure misinformation... the only appropriate thing to barely compare is the first three years or even four years... Next you have to put yourself in the shoes of the game developers and publishers... sure the Atari Lynx has higher specs but how many units sold in the first two and three holiday seasons? If say Atari Lynx sold one million units in the first year to actual consumers, then yeah, that looks great regardless of Gameboy selling two or three million because one million units sold means you might sell 1/4, 1/3 or maybe 1/2 of your game software to actual users provided the game was good, people talked about it, etc Did that actually happen? I'm sure it never did and instead they barely scratched 200k units and that's gonna ruin your plans of your third party game. Technically speaking that $180 price isn't a problem back then in U.S.A. alone but if people react a certain way then you aren't getting units sold and it's not cause of "Nintendo" Btw other companies can compete... and that's the nature of the game... Atari Jaguar had horrible marketing messages just like 3DO so it's no surprise that some people may have felt either insulted or mocked and either way not be so positive about buying those systems and not cause of "Nintendo" Nintendo secured an install base, they catered to their customers and for the most part didn't treat them like dumb idiots... something that Sega of America's management staff started doing in the early to mid to even late 90s like they never learned. SNK America or whatever the subsidiary branch was called were confused and didn't really know how to target older age groups well... and unfortunately the American subsidiary branches back then tended to completely ignore the Japanese marketing of showing the whole family both genders, late teens, twenty plus and grandparents playing from FamiCom to the NeoGeo AES... at least that may secure a better sales position than just using dumb advertising.

Of to a bad start with the thumbnail - that is the wrong Atari logo? I hate it when people do that! That logo was only ever used by Infogrames for a short time in the early noughties. The as soon as the video starts I see more stuff wrong - Mikey and Suzy (correct spelling) are the sound and graphics chips - the CPU is an 8-bit 65C02 running at 4 MHz. The Lynx name had NOTHING to do with the Panther, the fact that the Lynx, Panther and Jaguar are all big cats is pure coincidence. The Lynx is so called because it offers the opportunities for lots of "links" with other machines. The Panther and Jaguar were both named after cars. The original name for the Lynx was the APES (Atari Portable Entertainment System) but the programmers at Epyx pointed out how stupid it sounded and Atari changed it. With regards to sales, there is a good figure out there actually as according to ex-Atari Marketing Manager (and Lynx Product Manager) Daryl Still it sold around 3 million units (500k North America, 1 million UK, 1 Million France and 500k rest of Europe and Australia). You are wrong about the adventure RPG part - both Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Dracula: The Undead fit this category. But I won't argue that the Lynx is a magical machine and Lynx emulation is still a long way from being perfect, so nothing beats the real experience.