What did the original Amiga design team do after the Amiga went to market and Commodore wasted the opportunity? Jay Miner went back to designing medical devices, but three other members of the team designed the first color handheld game console, which, ironically, became the Atari Lynx. The Lynx reached the market September 1, 1989.
The Atari Lynx’s origins at Epyx
Dave Morse, the Amiga cofounder and former CEO, became a software manager at Epyx, one of the top game publishers for the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 home computers. Along with their own in-house hits, they distributed a number of Lucasfilm’s early titles. He later ascended to the position of Epyx CEO.
Morse’s son asked him if a portable gaming system was possible, so he approached former Amiga engineers RJ Mical and Dave Needle with the idea. They agreed to join the company and design a new console.
The hardware RJ Mical and Dave Needle came up with
Don’t think of the Lynx as a portable Amiga. It had 4096 colors like an Amiga, and used Amiga as a development platform, but the processor core was an 8 bit 65C02, and its resolution was 160×102. It supported hardware sprites but took it a step further, providing hardware support to zoom and distort them. By 1987, they had a working design. They called it the Handy.
The first prototype was black and white like the Nintendo Game Boy, but Mical and Needle wanted color. They weren’t stuck on the idea of 4,096 colors either. It was just a matter of price. The display was the priciest component, and they couldn’t go higher than 4,096 colors and remain cost effective, Needle told NOW Gamer in an article published January 22, 2009.
The 65C02 core was a logical choice because it was efficient both in terms of price and speed. Running at 4 MHz, it offered approximately double the performance of a Zilog Z80 at the same clock speed. And there was no shortage of experienced 6502 coders available, and Epyx had a large existing back catalog of games written for other 6502 platforms it could port relatively easily to the new console.
The problem was, Epyx was a relatively small company with a limited budget and the Handy was a big, ambitious project. Epyx needed a partner.
How Atari got involved and turned the Handy into the Lynx
Epyx first approached Nintendo, hoping to partner with them. The problem was, Nintendo had its own portable console in development, the Game Boy. The Handy made the monochrome Game Boy look like the Milton Bradley Microvision in comparison, but it was a little late for Nintendo to change direction.
Sega decided they would rather copy it than partner with Epyx, although that provided an opportunity for Needle to consult with Sega after the Handy reached its logical conclusion. That left Atari as the most logical partner, although Needle and Mical opposed working with Atari and Jack Tramiel. They’d been there, done that and turned it down already in the Amiga days.
But Tramiel loved the idea.
The problem was, Atari had the upper hand and took advantage of it. Atari included a clause in contract giving Epyx a 60 day deadline to fix any problem Atari found. Needle told NOW Gamer that Atari would routinely abuse this clause, giving inadequate time to fix the problems. Atari then used this as an excuse to withhold payments.
Epyx needed the money, because by 1987, it wasn’t making enough off selling 8-bit home computer software to sustain the company and its experiment with games based on VHS video tape failed. Driven to bankruptcy, Atari offered to pay what it owed, on the condition Epyx handed over control of the hardware.
Needle and Mical didn’t want to work for Atari. They stayed at Epyx long enough to finish the project and complete the handover, but refused Sam Tramiel’s offer to work at Atari.
How the Atari Lynx started out with a bang but fizzled out
Initially the Lynx sold well, selling 500,000 units in 1990. But color LCD screens were in short supply, and so was Lynx software, blunting its momentum. Epyx was supposed to produce games for the unit, but teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and reduced to 8 employees, only managed to ship 9 titles.
A total of 71 titles exist for the Lynx, compared to 1,042 games for the Game Boy. The Game Boy, which only beat the Lynx to market by about two months, sold 14 million units, and the release of the Sega Game Gear in 1991 sealed the Lynx’s fate. The Game Gear sold 5 million units in spite of being the inferior design, because it was backed by Sega and had a library of 365 titles. The Lynx sold around 2 million units total. The Lynx also lacked a franchise title. Its best launch title, Chip’s Challenge, became a hit, but on the wrong platform. It was part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack 4 for Windows 3.1 in 1992. Had Atari recognized Chip’s Challenge for what it was and promoted it, the story may have been different.
The first color handheld game console wasn’t a complete failure. But it didn’t perform as well as it deserved to.
Morse, Mical, and Needle resurfaced at 3DO, where they attempted a new idea in game consoles, a design that could be licensed to anyone. The idea seemed like a good one, but didn’t result in enough price reduction to make the console price competitive.
Was Jay Miner involved with the Atari Lynx?
ACE magazine, in its August 1989 issue, stated Jay Miner was involved as well. Wikipedia quoted ACE, crediting Miner and Dave Morse with designing the custom video circuit in the Lynx’s Mikey chip.
I’m not certain that’s accurate. I can’t find any other source stating Miner was involved, and Morse was the product manager. I think ACE‘s writers misheard or misremembered, attributing the design to Morse and Miner when it should have been Needle and Mical. That’s easy enough to do, given two Daves were involved. Had someone referred to “Dave and RJ,” it would be easy enough to mishear or misremember and translate that to the wrong Dave (Dave Morse) and Jay Miner.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
The Lynx was dogged by two problems: terrible battery life and not enough software (same old story with Tramiel Atari). And it really is all about the games, rather than the hardware specs, when it comes to the console market.
Atari would repeat the same mistake a few years later with the Jaguar – another innovative but flawed console which simply didn’t have enough games (or enough exclusive games) to attract an audience.
I agree, if Epyx had been financially healthy enough to port a dozen or two of its better C-64 titles to the Lynx early on, the Lynx would have stood a better chance.
I just cannot understand the Tramiel mentality of squeezing suppliers and distributors “until the pips squeaked”.
This might have saved a few bucks in the short term, but it severely damaged Atari’s reputation and made people reluctant to support their platforms.
The ST, Lynx and Jaguar might all have achieved greater success if Tramiel been a more amenable business partner and if he’d had more of a long-term vision than just selling a succession of hardware products as cheaply as possible. Apparently in later life Jack did admit that he hadn’t realised enough the importance of software. A lesson learned far too late.
I agree. I don’t negotiate a lot of deals, but I have been on both sides of them. And while maybe you’re negotiating with a billionaire, it’s more likely you’re negotiating with someone more ordinary, who’s trying to send their kids to college or trying to pay some medical bills and has the same needs you do. When I approach negotiations, I look for win-win deals. In the biggest negotiation I ever took part in, I saw it as a partnership that could really make the world a better place if we both succeeded.
I have little tolerance for zero-sum-game people. Maybe the next time someone pulls that crap with me, I’ll tell them the Atari Lynx story. The Lynx, ST, and Jaguar are all great examples but even the C-64, as big as it was, could have been bigger if Jack Tramiel had been a better business partner.