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 65CO2, 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 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, 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.
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.