By 1989 Atari corporation was poised to enter the video game industry again with a new gaming system entitled the Atari Lynx.

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THE RISES AND FALLS OF ATARI ESSAY

By 1989 Atari corporation was poised to enter the video game industry again with a new gaming system entitled the Atari Lynx. The Lynx was based on tecnology developed by Epyx corp. The Lynx was the world's first color handheld gaming system. In additon to color the system was configured such that it could be used equally by both right handed players and left handed players. An ability to link together up to 8 Lynx's for multiplayer action was also allowed via attaching the "comlynx" cables that each Lynx came with. At the time the only portable gaming system competing with the Lynx was the Nintendo Game boy which had a rather ugly black and white screen, with much glare and a rather hard to read screen. The Gameboy had lots of 3rd party developers and was well established in the market. Atari found it difficult to obtain third party developers for its system. Nintendo at that time required all of its third party software licensess to agree to exclusively develop software for Nintendo machines only as far as the US market went. Atari Corporation along with Sega of America worked to bring a monopoly/anti-trust suit against Nintendo for this very practice in America. Ultimately they won.

This meant that any company making titles for the NES or Nintendo Gameboy for the American market could then be free to develop other titles for any gaming system they so choosed including the Atari Lynx, or Sega Geness. Sega signed on many new third party licensses for its systems in response to this, while Atari had difficulty finding any third party developers for its systems. Those they did sign were small, basically new companies such as Telegames and a variety of other unknown firms.

Some did license their titles for Atari to develop on its own inhouse for its systems. Namco, Tecmo, Atari Games Corp, and others did this. The strongest source of software titles for the Atari Lynx was Atari Games Corp because Warner Brothers owned all of Atari games Corp and a large interst in Atari Corporation and wanted them both to do well. However Atari games Corp's titles were not exclusively licensed for Atari based systmes. So what Atari Corp had from them on their systems everyone else could have as well. If this two firms were one, a hell of a lot more interesting corporate battle with Nintendo and Sega would have been possible.

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