Why did a software company build the first color handheld?
The Lynx did not start at Atari. It started at Epyx, the California software house behind California Games and the rest of the Summer and Winter Games series on the Commodore 64.
In 1986 Dave Morse, a former Amiga manager, asked two engineers he had worked with, RJ Mical and Dave Needle, to design a portable game system. Both had come off the Commodore Amiga. Their internal codename for the machine was Handy.
What they produced in a software company's back room was years ahead of anything on a toy shelf. Handy ran an 8-bit MOS 65SC02 processor at 4 MHz alongside two custom chips, Mikey and Suzy. Mikey handled sound, video, timers and networking. Suzy ran at 16 MHz and did sprite scaling, distortion and rotation in hardware, work that home consoles of the day mostly could not do at all.
The screen was a 160 by 102 backlit color LCD showing 16 colors at once from a palette of 4,096. The whole unit could be flipped for left-handed players, with the display rotating to match. Up to eight machines could be daisy-chained on a cable called ComLynx. Epyx showed it as Handy at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in 1989.
How did Atari end up owning the Handy?
Epyx had a finished portable and no money to build it. The company shopped the design around the industry, and one of the companies that passed would go on to build its own color handheld instead.
"We showed it to Sega and hoped they would buy it instead of them doing what became the Game Gear," Mical said in a Retro Gamer interview quoted by Time Extension in 2023. Sega said no, and the Sega Game Gear arrived on its own two years later.
Atari Corporation said yes. This was Jack Tramiel's Atari, the consumer arm he had bought in 1984, not the Atari that had owned American living rooms in 1982. The two companies signed an OEM purchase and distribution agreement on 12 June 1989: Atari would manufacture, distribute and market the machine, Epyx would write the software.
Epyx never got the chance. Atari withheld a $2 million payment, and Epyx filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection before the end of 1989, which left Atari holding the entire project. Atari renamed Handy the Atari Lynx and put it in American stores in September 1989 at $179.99, with California Games in the box.
What could the Lynx do that the Game Boy could not?
Almost everything, on paper. The Nintendo Game Boy that reached American stores on 31 July 1989 had a 160 by 144 monochrome dot matrix screen, no backlight, and a processor design that was already old when it shipped. The Lynx had color, a lit screen, and hardware scaling that let Blue Lightning throw an arcade flight game onto a portable in 1989.
That gap was a deliberate choice on Nintendo's side, not an oversight. "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply," said Gunpei Yokoi, the Game Boy's designer, in the remarks collected in the book Yokoi Gunpei Game House.
The Lynx also had the better multiplayer story. ComLynx linked up to eight consoles on one chain, and the Lynx version of Todd's Adventures in Slime World became the first game to support eight-player co-op. Game Boy owners got two players and a Game Link cable.
The catch was arithmetic. Eight-player ComLynx needed eight Lynx owners in one room, and there were never enough Lynx owners anywhere to make that ordinary.
Why did the Lynx lose to a gray monochrome handheld?
Price came first. The Lynx cost $179.99 in September 1989. The Game Boy cost $89.99 and came with Tetris, a bundle that eventually moved 35 million copies of the game alone.
Battery life came second. The Lynx ran on six AA batteries and drained them in under five hours. The Game Boy ran on four and kept going for most of a school trip.
Software came third. Atari published 71 games for the Lynx across its entire life. Nintendo had Tetris, Mario, Zelda and the whole third-party industry following it onto a platform that would sell 118.69 million units counting the Game Boy Color.
Atari tried to fix the first two problems in July 1991 with the Lynx II: rubber hand grips, a smaller shell, a clearer backlit screen with a power-save mode that killed the backlight, a stereo headphone jack in place of the mono one, and a price cut to $99. It arrived the same year Sega put the Game Gear in American stores at $149.99, and the Game Gear went on to sell 10.62 million units by March 1996.
Atari discontinued the Lynx in 1995 at roughly 2 million units sold, and turned its attention to the Atari Jaguar, which did not go well either.
Who owns the Atari Lynx today?
The Lynx name belongs to Atari SA, the French company known as Infogrames Entertainment until 2009. Its chairman and chief executive is Wade Rosen, who is also the controlling shareholder through his holding company Irata LLC, which held about 41.7% of the capital as of August 2025.
That Atari has been buying rather than shrinking. It took a majority stake in the Swedish publisher Thunderful in August 2025 and raised that holding to 97% in January 2026, bought the emulation studio Implicit Conversions in April 2026, and paid an initial $29.3 million for Hipster Whale, the studio behind Crossy Road.
Rosen told Bloomberg in May 2026 that the company treats its long history of flops as tuition, describing the pattern as "failing towards the light". None of that spending has produced new Lynx hardware, and Atari has never announced any.
What it has produced is legal ways to play the library. Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, built by Digital Eclipse in 2022, includes Lynx titles alongside the 2600 and Jaguar catalogs. Evercade sells two physical cartridges, Atari Lynx Collection 1 and Atari Lynx Collection 2, with California Games, Chip's Challenge and Blue Lightning among them. For the wider story of the company, see who owns the Atari brand now.
Where to find an Atari Lynx in 2026
New games are still being made for it. Songbird Productions announced two Lynx releases for 2026, starting with the platformer Wee Ninja as a ROM in May and a physical cartridge in August, followed by a Caravan Edition of Microvaders built around a three-minute high-score run. The AtariAge store and forums carry more homebrew carts every year.
Where to find one today. A working Lynx or Lynx II generally sells for $80 to $250 depending on condition, and tested Lynx II units with cables and a couple of common carts tend to sit around $140 to $220. Retro specialists list consoles and cartridges together, which is the safer route for a 35-year-old machine: check the Stone Age Gamer Atari Lynx listings and buy a unit that has been tested rather than one sold as untested.
Expect the screen to be the weak point. Original capacitors and the rubber membrane under the buttons are the parts that fail on these, and a cheap console that needs both is not cheap.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Atari Lynx still made?
No. Atari Corporation discontinued the Atari Lynx in 1995, six years after its September 1989 launch, and no company has manufactured the handheld since. Atari SA, which owns the brand in 2026, sells Lynx games through the Atari 50 compilation and Evercade cartridges but has never reissued the hardware.
How many Atari Lynx units were sold?
The Atari Lynx sold roughly 2 million units between its September 1989 launch and its discontinuation in 1995. For scale, the Nintendo Game Boy that launched the same year sold 118.69 million units counting the Game Boy Color, and the Sega Game Gear sold 10.62 million by March 1996.
Who designed the Atari Lynx?
The Atari Lynx was designed by RJ Mical and Dave Needle, two engineers from the Commodore Amiga team, who began work in 1986 at the software company Epyx under the codename Handy. Atari Corporation acquired the project in 1989 after Epyx ran out of money and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.