Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 276: Atari Lynx

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

We've got a real blast from the past for you this week—which is kinda the point of Retronauts, but our newest episode is a blast from the past in an entirely different way. We originally recorded this one on December 6th, 2015, exclusively as an episode for our Kickstarter backers, but now so much time has passed that we feel it's the right time to release this podcast to the general public. So join Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and special guests Steve Lin and Jaz Rignall as the crew discusses Atari's oversized handheld and says things they likely don't remember in the distant year of 2020. Transport yourself back to a time when we were still excited for more Star Wars and get ready for this week's episode! Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week in Retronauts, a link to the past. Hi, everyone, and welcome to a special bonus episode of Retronauts recorded exclusively for the Kickstarter DVD. And we're going to talk this week about the Atari Links, an interesting and often overlooked piece of video game history. But I think a really great example of just something cool about video game history. And I think, you know, something that makes the links interesting in particular is the relationship it had with the Game Boy. The two kind of compare and contrast in a fascinating way.

and you can learn more and explain more about video game history by looking at the relationship these two systems had. They're interesting, good systems, and a vacuum, but even more valuable to study in a relationship to one another. So we'll be talking about that for the next hour. So this episode, I'm hosting. I'm Jeremy Parrish. Let's just go around the table for once. We can actually say in clockwise order or whatever, and it matters. Let's go counterclockwise.

So making his second retronauts appearance, we have. Steve Lynn. Steve, tell us just a smidgin about yourself. A collector and archivist, you know, always interested in the history of games. Now I'm starting to collect paper and things like press releases from the 80s. Yeah, I would love to dig through your archive of video game ephemera, like the non-game stuff that is so hard to come by. Yeah, things, you know, from court cases and important moments in game history. And so working to preserve a lot of that and prototype ROMs and getting them dumped and out to the public.

And, of course, opposite me diagonally. It's me, Bob Mackie. I boogie boarded here on the back of the links. Were you able to fit it in the narrow traffic lanes of San Francisco streets? No, I got ticketed. Yeah, I'm going to say. Thanks a lot, Atari. And then finally, I'm Jazz Rignall, and I've been around for a long time, been reviewing games since 1985.

Yeah, so why don't we all actually explain a little bit of our own histories with the Atari Links just to provide some context for this episode. I personally did not own a Links until, maybe about 10 years ago, Crispin Boyer was getting rid of like EGMs. old links and collection of games, so I bought it from him for like 50 bucks. It came with a couple of good games. It also came with Dirty Larry, probably like 15 games in total. It's a really cool system, but one that was outside of my price range. I couldn't even afford a Game Boy at the time that that was a new system, so I definitely couldn't afford a links, but it's one that I've kind of developed this respect for, despite

its kind of niche position and also ran status in video game history. I don't have a lot of personal experience with links, but I've read a lot of. about it a lot and studied it and written about it and talked to people about it. So, hopefully that's enough to go on. Steve, how about yourself? So I coveted the links when it was first released. I remember looking in Toys R Us and Behind the Glass case and it was always running the same demo of Blue Lightning, just kind of showing the scaling effects.

It was like a portable afterburner. It's amazing. But I bought the Game Boy instead primarily because of battery life and a lot of the titles that were showing up on the Game Boy. but I did pickable links about two years later when I started working in a used game store. So we had a lot of them traded in. I was able to get it cheap and a lot of games really cheap. And there was also a guy in the store that was a huge links fan.

So he was always like talking about how amazing kung food was. It was like something you need to play. And that was actually also the first time I ever used the Com Links cable because I never knew another person to own the links until that time. Yeah, I've never actually used the Com Links myself either. I've never been in the presence of another person using A-Links at the same time I was. That happened at Classic Gaming Expo, and I think we had eight-player slime world or something, or a gauntlet, and I think half the people had never used the ComLinks cable before. I was like, oh, this is the first time we're plugging in.

That's awesome. I think we actually realized that a couple people's Comlinks cables were broken. I never got a chance to try them. What a waste. Yes. Bob? I'm a little bit younger than most of the people here. So I guess my choices were more limited at the time.

So, I mean, I read about coverage of the links and lots of magazines, but it just seemed like the inferior choice to the Game Boy, which I trusted Nintendo because they brainwashed me from a young age. Yeah, I mean, if Nintendo Power said Game Boy was better than Links, who are you to disagree? They told me what to think, and I believe them. But I don't even think they were allowed to mention their competition. They're just like, no, we're the best. Forget about it. Those other guys. But, I mean, it looked cool and it looked neat.

I like the idea of this huge handheld with a giant screen, giant color screen. But I don't know, like no game really called out to me from the... the coverage I read. So, yeah, I was comfortable with my four-color Game Boy at that time period. And then, Jazz, you probably have the longest connection with the links. Yeah, I got one when I got one sent to me as a review copy. I was working on Mean Machines Magazine at the time. And, you know, I just loved the machine.

I just thought it was really cool. A lot of arcade conversions came out for it, and those really spoke to me, some of the Williams ones. And a lot of those arcade conversions were actually of a very high quality, better than, you know, most of the dedicated console versions at the time, particularly the 8-bit versions. And, you know, it was a neat machine. It had some amazing technology for its time. I mean, you know, we could talk about the battery life a little bit later. That's pretty tragic part of the Lynx's history. You know, it just eats batteries for lunch.

But, yeah, I just really like the machine. It was kind of different from the Game Boy. You know, it was high-end. In a way, it reminded me of sort of the old 8-bit wars in England in the early 80s, where you had the ZX Spectrum, which was the Game Boy, and then you had the Lynx, which was the high end. It wasn't even a Commodore 64. It was almost like an Amiga.

It was so far ahead. And, you know, you got what you paid for. He paid quite a high price, but what you got was an incredible piece of machinery for its time. And it had, you know, relatively, it looks tiny nowadays, of course. But at the time, that screen was huge and, you know, backlit. Incredible. Yeah, Nintendo didn't incorporate a backlight into its.

consoles until the DS. Game Boy Micro, no, actually Game Boy Micro came out after the DS. Game Boy Light also had... Oh, yeah, Game Boy Light. That was sidelit though. Yeah, wasn't it? Yeah. Okay, but that never came to the U.S. so... True. So it only kind of counts. Yeah, there was the Game Boy SP, but again,

that was, or Game Boy Advance SP, but that was sidelit. It wasn't like a proper backlight the way Links was. So it took ages for Nintendo to catch up, which was part of Nintendo's success strangely enough, and we'll talk about that. But it is interesting, jazz, that you mentioned the Amiga because the Lynx has a very strong connection to the Amiga. The three

designers responsible for the creation of the links had designed Amiga for Commodore. So those were David Morris, R.J. Michael, and Dave Needle. And the Lynx was actually conceived very close to here in San Francisco. It was developed originally by a company called Epix, even though Atari ended up launching it, releasing it in America. And they were a San Francisco-based company from some interviews I read with, I think R.J. Michael, he said that they, kind of conceived of the system in 1985, 1986 on cocktail napkins or whatever at a cafe

and Foster City. So, right here in the Bay Area, you know, that right there sort of set the links apart from Game Boy and really all the consoles at the time that were on the market, because the console industry had really shifted over to Japan at that point.

And Atari still had some skin in the game. I think you could buy like the $2,600 for probably $20 or something. And there was the 7,800, which was positioned as an NES competitor but never really gained any traction. I think they were trying to sell the XE at this time. Okay. But that's not really a console, though.

That was more of a computer. Yeah. It's next to the Nintendo. Yeah, the Atari ST was being sold still at that point. Yeah. It was still going strong, particularly in Europe. I don't know how well it did out here. Right.

But really, the console industry had shifted to Nintendo and Sega and NEC. Lynx was, I think, kind of the first really strong competitor that entered the console race from an American company in the latter half of the 80s, probably the only one, really, because there weren't any American consoles released until sometime in the 90s. So it was this kind of pushback and attempt by an American company, you know, eventually Atari, to sort of take back some space in the console market from Nintendo and Sega. It didn't work out, but it is kind of notable in that regard for being sort of, you know, the old guards attempt to counterattack, I suppose, if you want to put it in console wear terms. One of the things that's interesting, if you look at the early prototypes of the links, it really goes into that sort of Bay Area maker mentality. It's basically electronics screwed onto a piece of plywood. And so, you know, everything's hand-soddered, and it's a really interesting contrast to what you're. you see of like Game Boy prototypes, you know, being done in a lab.

These are, you know, like I said, designed on a cocktail mapkin and, you know, just hack together themselves. There's a place to store your hacky sacks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, a secret compartment for. It was made by epics who created California games. Oh, that makes sense then, yeah, yeah. So there should have been a limited edition links that came with California games and some hacky sacks.

Missed opportunity. Yeah, I've seen, there's a couple of collectors who have links prototypes in their collections. And they are, you know, kind of various states of kit bashes. basically the one that I've seen is it's about the same size as the original links model, so really big, but it's just kind of like smooth, kind of an ugly grayish plastic with big yellow buttons on it. Can you explain what a kit bash is? I've never heard of that term ever.

Kit bashing is where you take parts from different things and put them together. It's usually used in like models. Okay, yeah. Or like action figures where you take a bunch of different action figures and assemble parts to create a new character. I see. So like battlebots. Yeah, pretty much. But like not by design.

Like, these things were not meant to go together. Oh, got it. They just smashed them together. Got it. That's probably not the accurate term to use for this, but it sounds cool. I learned a new word today. It did. New portmanteau.

And the word itself is a portmanteau. Yeah, so the links is interesting because, like I said, it was conceived in 1985, 86, but it didn't actually launch until October, September, 1989. So it actually showed up long after the Game Boy launched, even though it was conceived before the Game Boy, well before the Game Boy. I think the timing of the Lynx's conception is really interesting because, I mean, it was a powerful system when it launched a side Game Boy, but if they had actually managed to get it out within a year or two of its conception, it would have blown away pretty much every system on the market.

It was an amazing piece of powerful technology. So just some quick information on the specs. The Lynx used a 65 CO2 chip, which was a variant of the same processor used in the NEP. a more powerful processor version. The 65 CO2 was also used in the turbographic 16 at about twice the clock speed of the Lynx. And Watar's supervision Game Boy competitor, a black and white system that was pretty obscure. And that was slower than the links. So, Links was kind of like in between, but it had, I think, a 16-bit address bus.

So it had the same claim to being a 16-bit system that the turbographics did. There was like turbographics had, you know, like a 16-bit graphics chip, I think. and the Lynx also had a discrete graphics chip, unlike a lot of the consoles at the time. So it was really kind of an amazing piece of hardware. It could process graphics in a way reminiscent of Sega's 16-bit super-scaler arcade machines. That was a big part of the built-in Links feature set, is that it could scale graphics. And you mentioned Blue Lightning before. Blue Lightning was very much a game built to show off the capabilities of the links.

It's not all that fun to play, but it looks amazing. Like, can you imagine playing a game like that in your hands in 1987 if the Lynx had launched when they intended it to? That would have been like... I would have died. Outrun and Afterburner were like a year old at that point. And here would be a tiny version of the same thing. Like, wow. So they were really just kind of shooting for the moon with the Lynx.

The original concept for the links was actually a black and white system. And that would have been probably, you know, more appropriate for the time. But the designers said, no, if we're going to make this, we really need to make it special. So they went, you know, the extra step and went for the color screen and the ability to process it. I think there were like, the color palette was like 4,000 colors. By comparison, the NES had a palette of 52 colors. So that kind of gives you a point of comparison for just how impressive the machine was. The NES was just reaching the American market in mass at the time that the Lynx was conceived.

So it was really like a next-gen system but in a portable form. So yeah, like I said, they were really shooting for the moon. What was your first impression of the links? Well, when I first saw it, I think, yeah, I saw the Blue Lightning demo and was totally blown away. It's interesting. Now we say, hey, you decided whether or not you bought a Game Boy or Lynx, but the The Lynx was also double the price at launch.

So, yeah, it's like, do I get two Game Boys or a Link? And also the games were more expensive. I think there were 3499, 3999. So it was almost like at launch, almost like a NeoGeo-NES comparison or Super Ness. But then as they started dropping the price, it became more reasonable to compare the two. It's like, okay, which one do I get? But it, like I said, it looked amazing. The biggest problem for me was actually the size.

I think it's really funny that, I guess, focus groups had originally said that they wanted something bigger. And then when it came out, everybody's like, why is this thing so big? So half the system, the original Links Model 1 is air. There's nothing in it. Yeah, the Links' hardware design is really just baffling. Like, it's meant to be a portable system, but it was about as portable as a Vectrix. Like, you just, there's actually a TV commercial that I love inserting into. videos whenever I have the opportunity, which has like, yeah, some, some kid like sneaking out

of class to go to the bathroom. He's like, hey, teacher, I need to go to the bathroom so he can go sit on the toilet and play links. But, you know, he's wearing a 1980s jeans jacket, and he reaches into his jeans jacket and pulls out of links that's like as big as his torso. I'm like, yeah, no one actually did that. If you look closely at that commercial, they actually custom sewed that pocket so that it held the links inside it. It's just ridiculous. Meanwhile, the Game Boy, people refer to the original Game Boy is the gray brick, but it was tiny compared to the, uh, to the links. Yeah. And all other factors aside, just the fact that you could actually take a Game Boy with you

in your pocket versus the links, which required, you know, a carrying case or, uh, like a luggage that you could drag behind you, uh, made a huge difference. Yeah, I think I saw it as a kid when I was much smaller and I just could not conceive of, like carrying it around. Like, even then I was like, that seems a little big, like, because I would put my Game Boy in my pocket or whatever, my book bag, but yeah, the Links was like I said, like a boogie board almost. Yeah, I mean, at this point, I'm like, why did I buy an iPhone plus when I should have

gotten just the, like, the standard iPhone? This thing's too big. So I can't even imagine being like half the size I am now and trying to carry a links that's like 20 of these put together. Yeah, I used to carry it on the train commuting. And, you know, it required, apart from the fact that you had to have a spare set of batteries with you at all times because it would just, the links would eat batteries. You know, they say the kind of battery life is somewhere between three to five hours.

depending on usage, it can drop to two hours on a game that's throwing a lot of sprites around. I mean, that blitter chip that sort of throws the graphics around, it just runs quite hot. And I think that was part of the reason why I had a lot of air room in there, just to keep the system actually quite cool, because it could heat up if you took it apart and played with it, you could actually feel that it was quite a warm little machine. And, yeah, it was just very large.

I did like the ambidextrous design. That was a very clever kind of concept just to be able to play it both ways. left or right-handed. A smart decision, but, yeah, it was definitely a real handful. We could even hold it vertically, right, for gauntlet and clacks have that bizarre. Yeah, in theory. The only other system I've seen that has an orientation option like that is the Wonder Swan, which was kind of done so you could play it horizontally or vertically.

And it's very rarely useful. I don't know, were there many games on links that had a need for a vertical orientation? I know there were a lot of midway classics, you mentioned Williams Classics. But those aren't vertical. Yeah, so... There's only three games, I think. It's a gauntlet clacks and the Riden, which came out later. Okay, so Riden is a good example.

Was Riden released officially, or was that a homebrew? I think that's one of those, like, semi-homebrew after Hasbro released the rights. Okay. Yeah, actually, that's something I'm still really fuzzy on is what happened with the rights, because there are a lot of actual, legitimate arcade conversions that show up outside of the main set of licensed links games. I guess we can talk about that later. But it did kind of have this weird, ambiguous life. In the end, there were only like 70, 72 license games for Links released in the entire time that it was alive, which was kind of a valid product on the market from 1989 through 1993, 94.

So that's not very many games per year. And, you know, that's kind of a chicken egg situation. Nintendo had all the licenses sort of wrapped up for Game Boy and NES. And so it was hard for games to come to the links. then people didn't buy it, so then there was no real compelling reason for more games to go to links. So it just kind of fizzled out right from the start. That definitely wasn't a problem with the technology because the systems tech itself, like the hardware power, was remarkable. You mentioned the blitter chip jazz.

If I'm not mistaken, the blitter chip could actually produce an unlimited number of sprites on screen at once. I'm not exactly sure how that works, but, you know, for most consoles, they have a hard limit on sprites. It's like you could have 24 sprites on screen, and there could only be like six of them on the same row. Otherwise, you get the flickering that you saw on NES and Genesis. So the ability to throw around as many sprites as possible, you know, at the expense of extra battery drainage. That was a pretty ambitious design choice. Yeah, it was, you know, I mean, it was a machine that was designed to do 3D games of the day, you know, when 3D was sprite scaling. And the Amiga had the same kind of hardware.

So I think, you know, they just leveraged what they knew and kind of used it in this smaller form factor. But it just followed the same sort of technology underpinnings. And it was just designed to throw very, very large amount of sprites on screen. I can't remember exactly how many the limit was. I thought there was sort of 4,000 sprites. There's 4,000 colors. Yeah. I read a couple of different documents on Lynx's capabilities before coming here.

and all of them said it was unlimited number of sprites. So I assume it's just however many you could actually get on the screen, which one of the weird things about Links is that even though it was much more powerful and had great color options, the screen was actually much lower resolution than the Game Boy is. The Game Boy was 160 by 144 pixels. Links was 160 by 102. So it was actually, you were seeing fewer pixels being moved around. And that could make games feel a bit claustrophobic. Like Todd's Adventure and Slime World is a really kind of cool, ambitious metro. Radvenia-esque game, but it feels really cramped because, you know, it's missing 40 lines of

resolution that the Game Boy had. And Game Boy games could feel pretty cramped as it was. One thing you mentioned was, you know, there's not a lot of games. I think the other problem is there's not a lot of variety. There's no RPGs, at least for the system. I was a huge RPG kid back then. So that's probably why I never really looked twice at the links outside of like, oh, that game looks neat, but, you know, what else am I going to play?

Yeah, I think, like, what, Bill and Ted's excellent adventure is the only one with the password. Sometimes that's the thing you want to save your progress. But, yeah, the rest of them, you know, like Jazz mentioned, great arcade conversions, tons of Atari stuff, you know, Zibots, and at the end of the day, those are something you want to pick up and play for a couple minutes and then set down. Maybe it's a factor-in battery life. That was definitely an issue for me, I think, you know, even if I could have afforded

a links, I don't think I would have been that interested because ever since I started, you really seriously gaming on consoles, I like meteor experience. is. I mean, arcade games, quick pick up and play was great in the arcade. But when I was at home, I wanted something a little more substantial. And quick time killers have never been a big thing for me. And that was pretty much the Lynx's catalog. You know, platformers like Todd's Adventure and Slime World were really uncommon. I guess Gauntlet is the closest thing it had to an RPG because you did have the dungeon crawler aspect to that. But those were a few and far between. It was much more of like a quick thrill kind of experience, which that's totally valid. And for people who wanted that sort of arcade at home, or arcade in your pocket experience, links delivered much better than the Game Boy did, which was more puzzlers and platformers and RPGs. So, you know, it's a strength and a weakness both for the system, just the fact that it had this kind of different focus to its content. But with so few games being released for the system,

I think that kind of naturally limits the variety that's possible. It's another one of those situations where they probably wanted a broader array of games, but it just didn't work out that way. There's also something to do with the battery life that sort of didn't lend itself to games that took a lot of long-term play. Unless you sort of plugged it into the wall and sat on your sofa, it sort of wasn't a great handheld for those meteor experiences. So I just wonder if that was by accident that they ended up with a bunch of arcade games or whether that was partly by design. That's something I really don't know. I think it was sort of natural fate.

And it gets into sort of the development history of the links, which is, like I said, it was originally conceived by designers at Epix who had come over to the company from working on Commodore's Amiga. And Epic's kind of made its name in the early to mid-80s developing Commodore games. Like I said, California games, winter games, summer games. Those were kind of the big ones. But they had a bunch of others. There was like a karate champion kind of game, like a kind of knockoff of karate champ. A few others that were really kind of big for Epic. And it became a pretty large company.

So this was kind of an atypical example, really, of a software company in the 80s saying, hey, we should make hardware. Usually hardware in the 80s was by toy companies like Mattel or Colico. So this was, you know, kind of a sort of unusual approach, software company saying, hey, we should get into the hardware biz. It's like Hudson, right? Yeah, Hudson. Like on the Japanese side, there was a little more of that.

But in America, it tended to be toy companies as opposed to. software companies. So they started developing it. But around the time they were developing it, the Commodore market sort of imploded, and the company ended up laying off, I think they were like a couple hundred people, and they ended up laying off most of their staff, and ended up really small. So they didn't really have the means to bring the links to market. They called it Handy at the time.

In its prototype phase, it was called the Handy. Oh, that's unfortunate. Well, I think Handy meant something different back then. I have a filthy mind. I don't want to say that I never understood the appeal of the California games I think that game is just bad Surfing's fun

It feels like the challenge is like How do I control this character And then like That's the challenge of the actual game I think I've never played the original C64 version So maybe it's good But yeah the like the NES port

It was port is everything It was yeah The NES port is the only one I've played And it's just like Uh what But I don't know Maybe things were different back then Maybe the C64 version was amazing

I think California I played it and loved it And I had a lot of fun with it. The hacky-sacking was a really good little mini-game. The surfing was quite good. And it was coming off the back of a series of games that had been very popular. So I think it kind of, you know, sort of help to help sort of knock through some of its rough edges. Right.

I think also think California was more exotic in the 80s. It was. It was still growing. Pink bikinis and convertibles and palm trees. They all disappeared. Yeah, I think California still had that sort of like far away mystique that you see in movies of like the 50s and 60s. So maybe that was part of it. too. So they decided to make this portable system and putting that in the context of

1986, not only was the NES only just on the American market, the SIGA master system just coming to the American market. If you look at the portable history of games to that point, you had, you know, in 1979 you had Milton Bradley's microvision, which was like pretty much the most primal form of video games you can get. It was like black and white LCD 16 by 16 grid of pixels. So it was like you could play pawns. on it and not really much else. There were the LED sports games, which were even more simplistic. It was just like dots that kind of resembled football or basketball.

If you squinted right and were like, oh, yes, I can see how that might be a running back. Of course, Nintendo had the Game and Watch series as of 1981, I want to say. And those were more sophisticated certainly in presentation, even if not necessarily in terms of gameplay. because it was just like kind of that simple binary motion, like something is either moving here or it's not, but everything was pre-printed and looked really nice. And that was kind of, you know, the jumping off point for Nintendo's console design, including Game Boy.

And then sort of on the more sophisticated side in 1983, 84, Epic's released, or Epic, not Epic's, Epic, released a system called the Pocket Game Computer, which was really the first proper handheld game console, and it ended up having like six games for it, including Sokobon, because Sokobon's on every portable system. Not the Lynx, right? I think it has a Sokobon clone, doesn't it?

Maybe it doesn't. Oh, man. Links is like a haven. I'm so tired of box puzzle games from Game Boy. There's not even a Shub it cloned? Shub it was Sokobon. It was just another name for the official Sokobon conversion. That's how I feel about Sokabon.

Shove it. Yeah. I thought I liked it until I started, you know, covering Game Boy in depth. And now I'm like, yeah, okay. I can only push so many boxes. Pocket game computer was pretty sophisticated, but it was still much more primitive in design and capabilities than the Game Boy. You know, you would have gone, had everything worked out with handy, you would have gone from this Pocket Game Computer, which was like half a Game Boy, to something that was kind of somewhere between the Turbographic 16 and the Amiga in terms of power. Like the actual color capabilities of the links, the designers deliberately made to run parallel to the Amiga's capability.

is the Amiga could show 4,000 colors, the links could show 4,000 colors. So that would have been probably the biggest generational leap in a platform format in the entire history of video games had it happened, but it didn't quite happen. But it would have been amazing. You know, that's a very ambitious design for a game system. And I think somewhat as a result of that, epics, which was shrinking at the time due to the shrinkage of the C-64 market, just didn't have the wherewithal to bring it out. So they started peddling it around to other hardware manufacturers to say, look, check it out.

We have a portable game system. It's amazing. You should release it. And there's a very, I think it's on nowgamer.com. There's a sort of a first person account of their attempt to show it to Nintendo and get Nintendo to license it. I don't know if you guys have ever read this. Is that with like Hank Rogers or something like that? Yes.

I just like that Hank Rogers is the godfather of all video games. He's everywhere. The creator of the JRP, importer of Tetris. He's like, yeah. And we're all going to live forever because of him. We're all going to get Tetris games forever because of him. Yeah, so Hink Rogers, of course, is the guy who worked to bring Tetris to the West and helped get it licensed to the NES and had a key role in that, you know, all the rigamar role around the legal issues with the console version of Tetris in the 90s. But he was like the East West guy of the 80s.

He was like the one guy who had his foot in the Japanese and Western Mark. markets. So he really did kind of like play mediator and facilitator. So he helped set up an appointment between Epix and Intendo and Epic's executives went to Nintendo and pitched them on the idea of the links. But the account that I read online, I think, again, it was R.J. Michael, I could be mistaken, but you can check it out on Nowgamer, just look it up. Anyway, he said that it was just a kind of spur of the moment thing where they said, let's go and pitch this to Nintendo and he was uneasy about it because he was like, you don't really go to a Japanese company cold calling them without a plan and just say, do this thing. But they went and I think it was David Morris who kind of took lead on the presentation. And according to the interview or the account, he was very bombastic about it. It wasn't like a try to get in Nintendo's good graces, but more like, we have this amazing thing and you need to do this. And if you can't understand why you need to do this, you're idiots. And it didn't go over. very well. And so they ended up

actually being, according to this account, again, it's all secondhand information, but they all ended up being ushered out of the building. But before they went, Nintendo said, wait a minute, some representatives disappeared and then came back with a little box, so they opened up, and there was a working Game Boy

prototype, and at that point, they realized, oh, well, we really blew this. So, yeah, Nintendo had a working prototype for Game Boy coming out, and Epix realized, while we're in trouble, obviously, they're not going to want this, and now we have to face Nintendo's huge global

reach with our system. So they started working with Atari instead, and it should be noted that they worked with Atari Inc, not Atari Games. There was a split in the 80s. Atari Games continued making arcade machines. Atari Inc. was more the computer company run by

the Tremiels. And I've never heard anything good about the Tremiels. Jack Tremiel and his son, Sam. I will say that it would be really weird to have a boss who survived the Holocaust. because you could never complain. You know, like, for everything this guy did, he also survived concentration camps. I didn't realize that about Tremil.

Yeah, I was, I mean, I was reading about him. It's like, I don't know, like, I feel like his cutthrow business practices, we can maybe forgive them a little bit because of what happened to him. I don't know. It's just an interesting fact. That's, that's headier than I want to get into. Yeah, I'm just letting people know, like, I thought that wasn't an interesting fact about the guy. Like, he survived, and I'm sure it informed his personality after that.

Well, I think that the, especially for the Tremil, is that that kind of brings a along with it, a bunch of issues with the links that came out in the actual shipping product. You talked about the prototypes you saw being like a cheap white plastic. It was molded in a cheap white plastic that was painted, and then that flakes off. And so you see a lot of used Model 1 links that's right around the handholds. It's just, you know, chipping off. They painted it? That's weird.

Yeah. Okay. Well, because they didn't want to spend the extra money to actually injection molded with the proper color. it was a lot cheaper to use that, like, cheap, white, gray plastic instead. Well, the links is big enough. You could probably get, like, a cool mural, like, airbrushed on the side, you know? Like, it's a wizard or something from a mountain, yeah. Yeah, they should have done more special editions, like, things along the back.

It would be great. Yeah. After the concert, you just climb inside your links and took up. Nintendo, Nintendo made a tribal tattoo Game Boy SP. They did. This is less tacky than that. Nothing is tackier than that Game Boy. Yeah, so anyway, the Tremales, like I said, don't have the best reputation

and pretty much every account I've heard of people dealing with Atari Inc. Ends with people getting screwed over and going out of business. And that's what happened with epics. Atari took on the handy, renamed it Links, which was a good choice. That was actually the start of their cat naming, wasn't it? Yeah, so there was links and then later the Jaguar. And did they have like a prototype that had another cat name? Panther.

Panther, yes. That's what it was. That was like 32-bit one that Jaguar skipped over. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they wanted to do the math. Does I even know where that, I mean, why that decision was made, these cat names? Was it just like, we're the stronger competition like, I guess it's like... They were like, well, Sega's going to be doing Bible books. They've got Genesis.

So obviously the Exodus is next. We might as well go with cats. It feels like they're naming a car or something, you know, like... I don't know. Give the user confidence. That's what Apple does now. Well, not anymore, but... Meanwhile, Android's like, cotton candy update.

Gingerbread. Yeah, so anyway, the Atari Epic's contract granted Atari final approval over here. handy software. Basically, Atari would manufacture the system and Epix would produce most of the initial software for it. And Atari had final rights to sign off. So based on a few accounts that I've read, Atari abused this power. They had to sign off and get final approval on things, but they would come with these lists of things that needed to be changed, like at the last possible minute before milestones. As a result, Epix wasn't able to make the changes on time. Their software fell behind milestones. Atari wouldn't pay them out. So this company was all

already hemorrhaging money. And not being paid their milestone fees by Atari was a burden they couldn't handle. So they were on the brink of going out of business. And Atari very magnanimously said, well, you know, even though you're not making good software, we could go ahead and pay you the money for these if you give us all rights to the links. So epics no longer had a stake in the links. All of a sudden, they, you know, in order to survive, they had to get to give up their baby. And the creators of the Links were not very happy about that. I think Dave Needle said that he really just wanted to storm out of the company at that point, but he was worried that he would open himself and Epic's up to legal action, like this is an attempt to sabotage

the Links project. So he stuck around for a while. This all gets back to kind of the nature of the Link software, which was initially just stuff done by handy and conversions of Atari games. At that point, Atari and Midway had a relationship. The whole, I mean, we kind of went over that in the Williams episode. But, yeah, like Williams Midway Atari games, all kind of... Valley is in there, too, somewhere, right? Valley, yeah. Now they just, you know, they're like Konami and they just make exercise equipment.

But, yeah, like, there's all this kind of like, they were in bed with each other. It naturally sort of ended up that you saw a lot of arcade games on links just because that's sort of who was involved in the creation of the software. That's what they had available too. I mean, in terms of their back catalog, it just made a lot of sense to dip into the Atari back catalog and leverage that. Yeah, and I mean, where else were they going to put those games? You did see some Atari games end up on Game Boy, but Atari really didn't want to have too many of their key games on Game Boy

because they were the competition that was Nintendo. So it was kind of a situation with Tengen on the NES, where Tengen became sort of the unlicensed haven for companies, who sort of had it in for Nintendo. So Atari, Namco, who else? Sega. Sega, yes. Of course, Sega.

So that way they could kind of, you know, get their software onto a very popular platform, but not line Nintendo's pockets in the process. This was a more, I think, legitimate way to go about that same thing. Like, we have our own console that is an alternative to Nintendo systems, and we can get our games on here.

So there were quite a few Namco games, a handful of Tecmo games. There's a pretty good Ninja Guideon on that. At least I think Ray liked it when we did our episode about Ninja Guideon. Yeah, we can talk about the software later. But yeah, Techmo had some pretty solid games on there. That was pretty much it, though. There weren't really a lot of third parties supporting the system.

I think Techmo just was like, we'll put our games on anything. They were – Techmo was the only third-party publisher for Sega Mark 3, the master system, in Japan. So that kind of tells you everything you need to know about. Tecmo's approach to licensing at that point. It was just like, get out there. Kind of like Capcom in the 90s. So, yeah, that's kind of the natural limitations on the links.

Anyway, why don't we take a break now? In this quarter on the Greenlit podcast network, Chris Sebs and Matt Wilson. And in this quarter, VHS oddies, confusing animation, and modern not-so classics. Plus snacks, movie fighters, we watch movies and beat them up. They say with age comes wisdom. Well, over here at The Cartridge Family, we only have one question. Who are they? Join three imperfect dads as they juggle kids, wives, and jobs

while indulging in their favorite hobby, playing video games. The Cartridge Family, a Greenlit Network podcast. Hey, Chris, what's the War Rocket Ajax podcast about? Well, Matt, if we were smart, it'd be about murders, but it's actually about comics. War Rocket Ajax, it's not about murders, but it is weekly on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So we've talked a lot about the abilities and features of the links and gotten a little bit into sort of the things that undermined its success in the U.S. actually globally. It was pretty popular in Europe, wasn't it? Not hugely.

I mean, it had a kind of a hardcore following of people that were the usual thing with an expensive machine. You know, you have those ambassadors that absolutely love it. And as far as they're concerned, it's the best thing ever. Scoff at the Game Boy, which was, you know, a cheap inferior, a load of rubbish, but not. The Game Boy is far, far more successful in Europe just because of the price point, I think, largely. But the press didn't get behind it massive. and I think a large part that was just down to the games. You know, we just didn't really get that many games released over there.

Well, there weren't that many games to release. Yeah. That's the problem. Yeah, so I feel like there are a few factors that really undermined links. One of them being just kind of the shenanigans Atari was up to with suffocating epics and resting control away of the system. But, you know, there was also, like we mentioned, the focus testing that they underwent, where kids said, we want a game console that's huge,

so we feel like we're getting our money's worth, which in practice no one actually wanted with a portable system. But probably the biggest problem was just all the power that the links packed. We've kind of touched on this a little bit. There are tradeoffs we make with electrical engineering and system design. And I think that's especially true with portable devices, everything from an iPhone to Nintendo 3DS or whatever, because you do have these devices that are meant to kind of,

do everything. They have their own power source. They have their own screens. They have their own processor. They have their own control inputs. That's a lot to pack into just a tiny amount of space. Even if you do like Atari and make the tiny amount of space very large, you still have to cram a lot in there. And, you know, if you put in a lot of processing power and a, you know, a color screen and a backlit screen, that's going to be detrimental to battery life. And it's also going to cost more. So the lynx was twice as expensive as Game Boy. It required 50% more batteries.

It was 6AA batteries versus 4. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, this is a cavernous battery bay for it. And battery life could run anywhere, like Jess said, from 2 to 6 hours. Two to five hours. That had to add a lot to the weight of the lengths. Six, six AA batteries. Not that much.

I mean, two AA batteries don't weigh that much. I think six would be considerable. Sure, but I mean, I think something that size you needed a little bit of mass. to it was mostly hollow. Otherwise it would just float away. But like I was saying, it's probably one-third the battery life of Game Boy, the original Game Boy model, for 50% more investment in batteries. So that ends up being, what, six times as expensive to run in addition to being two

times as expensive to buy? This might be a dumb question, but was there an AC adapter port? There was. Okay, good, yeah. But I assume you had to buy that separately. You did. Yeah, thought so. And it was like, I think.

was like $40. One of the things that was, when we sold it at the used game store, every time we sold all the links, we always told people to buy the AC adapter. Like, don't make a mistake. Same with the game gear, too. Yeah. And, you know, battery life, batteries were expensive. I mean, they still are expensive.

And I'm going to admit this for the first time. The only time I ever shoplifted anything, I stole batteries so I could power my Game Boy. Wow. The statute of limitations is up on that. Yeah, yeah. That battery one stop in the mall is going to come after me. Yeah, that was a serious problem, right? If you didn't have batteries, then you couldn't play the system

and the links just chewed through them. The one guy we know who had a lynx had an AC adapter and almost never had it portable because then you would have to buy six batteries. Right, which, again, you know, undermines the value of a portable console. And I think, you know, the Virtual Boy suffered a similar problem in that it was a portable system, but it really wasn't.

It's kind of this fundamental failure of conceptual design. If you create a device that is supposed to do one thing and then it can't logistically do that, I think at that point you need to say, are we doing the right thing here and go back to the drawing board? And far be it from me to tell the creators of the links, oh, you guys screwed up. But I think it's a problem we see a lot in hardware design and video games. Everything from like all the crap they packed into the PlayStation 3 that raised the price to $600. dollars, you know, everyone does it. There is this kind of, I think, a love among engineers of just cramming in as many capabilities and doing cool stuff as much as possible.

And one of Nintendo's strengths has generally been, you know, Virtual Boy accepted, this kind of understanding that you can't do everything. So you need to say, what do we want to do, and how can we do this as effectively, efficiently, and inexpensively as possible? And that's one of the big reasons the Gameboy trumped the links because Gumpet Yokoi said we could make a really powerful system, but that would be kind of missing the point. We need a system that is affordable for kids, and we need a system that's going to be playable for a long time on a few batteries so that it doesn't get expensive. And that's what the Game Boy did. It sacrificed color.

It sacrificed hardware power in order to give kids the ability to play NES-ish games on the go at a price that they're. they could afford. And that was kind of where the links fell short. And I, you know, I'm, I'm willing to be a little lenient, a little forgiving for them for making that error because they were working in untested territory. Like, there weren't really portable systems at that point. We kind of went over the ones that did exist. There wasn't enough of a market, like real, legitimate, valid game systems that you could play on the go for there to be sort of a base of wisdom to say, this is what works, this is what doesn't. They were exploring the market. And it was really the game. Boy versus Links was the first opportunity we really had to see, like, what is most important portable games? What do people want from this style of game? And it turned out that unlike in the arcades, people who wanted portable systems didn't want just the craziest, flashiest, most impressive thing imaginable. They wanted something that was convenient, inexpensive, and easy to use.

I also think Nintendo was like they were the masters of PR back then in terms of getting the message out in a pre-internet world. Like on sitcoms, if someone was playing a game, it was usually a Game Boyer in N.E. Yeah, it's just because, like, oh, that's the thing you go to. So, like, I feel like they had more mindshare, and that was really important, too. Like, what was Atari doing? Did they have a magazine at the time or anything like that? I don't think so.

Because, like, everyone had their own, like, Sega had a magazine. Yeah, like a newsletter. I mean, the ad campaign was weird. There's what that really funny one, like, Lynx eats boys lunch, you know, trying to do that aggressive, like, NeoGeo style campaign. Like, look how amazing our machine is. But, yeah, they didn't have the marketing muscle compared to Nintendo. They didn't have the money for it. You know, you're talking, Bob, about mine share and marketing, and that is important.

But I really do think in a lot of cases, it just boiled down to seeing these two systems side by side at Walmart and saying, well, one of these is $90. One of them is $180. You know, when it comes down to that question, like, which are you going to buy for your kids? The value was important. And I think that's, like, a huge part of it. But I think the, it just like for me as a kid, it wasn't really, the links was never part of the conversation, you know, like we were so wrapped up in Nintendo stuff.

And the links was this weird oddity that I maybe saw on the stuff. store, but it was just like Nintendo was the topic, you know. Though I will say that, you know, in the 8-bit era, Atari did do pretty good business by being, like, the cheap system that parents got their kids instead of a Nintendo. The 7800 was, I think, quite a bit cheaper than the NES. And it ended up selling pretty well. It sold several million units, if I'm not mistaken, which, you know, wasn't a patch on the NES's 40 million worldwide or whatever.

But still, like, it wasn't a complete fly. It did pretty well. But the problem is they took the opposite tack for the links. They didn't say, let's, you know, create the cheaper alternative to Nintendo so that parents who can't afford Nintendo can get their kids this. They were the expensive alternative, and parents who couldn't afford a links got their kids Nintendo. Plus, Nintendo had Mario and Tetris and all these other games that were popular and recognizable

and demoed well. I mean, blue lightning demoed well, but so did Tetris in completely different ways. And I think Blue Lightning was really cool to look at, but Tetris was the kind of thing that, say, your dad could walk by and play and say, oh, I get this. This is fun. I'm going to get this for my kids, so I can play it. It was a big zeitgeist moment because, like, every member of my family was playing my Game Boy and Tetris. Like, everyone got it. Well, you can see, I mean, Atari started realizing the writing on the wall pretty quickly because then you saw the price drops, right? The system going from 180 to 150.

And then I think it was like Gates of Santa Con. you could get as well or, you know, proofs to purchase things. And then the Links 2 coming out with the redesign and then cutting the price again. But at that point, too little too late. Yeah. Right. Yeah, the Links 2 didn't show up until, I want to say, 93. I think it was 92.

Oh, no, actually, 91. So it was actually faster than I thought. But, yeah, I think at that point the price dropped to like $1.29 or something. So it was a pretty affordable alternative. But, you know, in 1991, Game Boy had hundreds of games out. links had a few dozen. Game Boy just had momentum and mindshare. I think at that point, like you said, it was too little too late.

There was just no way it could overcome Game Boy's enormous lead. I think people tend to talk about console wars as if there's like a clear victor and loser as if it's, you know, in either or situation. And that's not really true. But in this case, there just wasn't enough of an audience to justify making games for links. So people didn't make games. So people didn't want to buy the system. So it did kind of feed on itself.

One thing you don't see what the links that you see with a lot of other systems is games getting better over time as, you know, developers learn the hardware and all the tricks and everything. And there are some exceptions, but I just don't feel like early in the systems life versus late releases have that much of a difference. Whereas if you look at something like Game Boy, it's very clear that people learned how to optimize for that system. Especially things like if you play WarioLand 2, the non-gameboy color version, that's on the same hardware that ran around like baseball and Tetris. But, like, they figured out how to make games so much better and more ambitious and things like that. Right. Yeah. I think part of that is because, you know, the system's creators were making the original wave of games.

So they knew the hardware inside and out. And then after that, it was no longer handy or no longer epics making games. It was, you know, Atari or third parties or whoever. So you kind of lost that intimate knowledge of the hardware. I think that was a big sort of step back. But there were a lot of good things about links. It had a serial cable, just like the Game Boy's link cable. I think it could connect up to 16 people, or was it 8?

I think it was 16. No one ever did that. Every link's owner in your state can join up. Yeah, I mean, I think theoretically Game Boy could do 32, but like really, there was maybe one game that could actually do that. So the screen was capable of displaying 4,000 colors. Technically, it could show 16 at once, but there were tricks that. that they could do with cycling and sub-pixels to make it look more, like more colors than 16. It had a 4-MHz processor, which actually was faster than the chip in the Super NES.

I mean, it's not comparable, different styles of hardware. But, you know, if you're just going to go by raw numbers, yeah, it was a fast chip. Well, actually, Super NES was a slow chip. It had four-channel audio. The Links 2, I think, made it stereo. Initially, it was Monarle. It had a separate graphics chip and a separate math co-processor in addition to the 6-5-C0. two chips.

So there was a lot happening inside. As Jazz mentioned, the screen was huge compared to the Game Boy's. Game Boy had like a two-inch screen. I think Lynx was 2.4. It wasn't like enormously bigger, but it looked bigger. It gave, you know, the impression of being bigger. And I think because it had a lower resolution, it looked like the pixels were chunkier, so it looked like, oh, bigger.

And it was backlit as well. I mean, it was just, it demoed a lot more impressively. And like you said, it was meant to be a 3D, quote unquote, system using scaling effects. So scaling and distortion were built into the hardware, which was something we wouldn't see in consoles until the Super NES, which had its kind of special graphics modes. So there was a lot happening in the system. But, you know, there were all the things going against it.

And ultimately, links, I think it cracked, you know, a million units, but not much more than that. They sold out the initial release of the links. So there was kind of that big splash of whatever, it was 50,000. units or something. Because I think people did say, hey, this is sort of the premium portable game system and something you want to get. But then, yeah, after that. Yeah, so it looks like it was about 3 million units total, which isn't terrible. Like, it was not a bomb, a dud, but it didn't have the penetration that it really needed to

be a viable long-term system. So it's a shame, but that's kind of how it went. Anyway, there were a lot of good games made for the links. Do we want to talk about some of those? I don't have a lot of experience with links software. I don't either, but I'll believe you if you tell me they're good. Well, kind of the ones that really stand out to me, and everyone can kind of mention their own, but Chip's Challenge was actually a really solid puzzle game that ended up being ported to a lot of different systems. It started on links, but it made it to a lot of different systems. Oh, it started on links. Okay.

I'm familiar with the PC version of that game. Yeah, that evolved from the links version. And there was actually a sequel design for NES that never was released, right? That was just recently kind of acquired and dumped, I think. Yeah. In fact, that was Franksafaldi and me. We found the prototype and dumped it. So it does have an NES exclusive level.

And there was a Kickstarter for a sequel recently. There were a lot of, I think, licensing and legal issues around the game. And I don't know if those all got worked out, but basically a successor was recently kickstarted. So yeah, that's definitely one worth owning. If you own a links, get that game. Gauntlet the Third Encounter, we mentioned briefly Gauntlet. Gauntlet. This was not the arcade gauntlet. It was a sequel that was unique to Links and was really kind of weird. It had all this stuff you didn't see in the other

Links games. There were like 20 character classes and they were all over the place. Like nerd, I can't remember what else. It's like just a ton of weird, weird character classes and it had, you know, huge multiplayer support. You said you played that at CGE, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I've played gauntlet. It's pretty much the same game, right? In terms of it's solid. It is weird that you have to hold the vertical orientation. So and that kind of seems bizarre to me. I think the only thing is that they wanted you

be able to see where you were going or more of the play field. But if you think about it like the arcade game was horizontal, so why would they do that? Maybe to accommodate the Comlinks cable or something. Yeah, maybe it's something to do with the fact that the vertical resolution

wasn't particularly very good. So like stats and things like that. Yeah. Oh, actually, yeah, that That is a good point. That makes sense. You can display more numbers because you have more lines. Another notable one is you mentioned Ninja Guiden earlier, Bob. Yeah.

The Ninja Guiden port was, and also RIGAR, both of those were the arcade versions, as opposed to the ones that were based on the NES game, which is kind of what you saw on non-NES platforms. But strangely enough, in 1993, they brought Ninja Guidean 3 to Links, and that was a scaled-down port of the NES game. So the first Ninja Guideon was the arcade game. and had nothing to do with the NES game. And then the third, Ninja Guideon on Links, they skip the second one, was based on the NES game.

So it's kind of this weird inconsistency, but also, like, there was no other port ever of Ninja Guidean 3. Like, it's only ever been on NES. There was, you know, the reissue on Super NES, and then a Links port. So just kind of like this random thing out in the middle nowhere. In my opinion, that's the worst of the Ninja Guidean trilogy on NES. But still, it's cool that existed on a portable system. and even though the graphics were kind of scaled down

and everything looked kind of pixelated and weird, it still played like you would expect Ninja Guide in 3-2. It got a lot of multi-platform releases. Limnings, of course, was on everything. Toki, that weird arcade game where you were like an ape man. Rampart. That also showed up on Game Boy, but it was much more impressive on Links.

Shadow of the Beast, which I guess makes sense, given the kind of close ties to Amiga that the system had, but I know Shadow of the Beast was a hugely popular Sygnosis title in the UK. People, I don't know that people necessarily loved it here, but you always saw it on like, you know, running as a demo at computer shops because it looked so great. Yeah, it was one of those games that made a great demo, but wasn't particularly fun to play. I know some people really swear by it, but for me, it has many of those horrible platform game trappings.

The jump in particular is not very good and a bit frustrating, so not too keen on that game. It actually did make a better links game as far as memory recalls. Really? Yeah. That's cool. I mean, it looked amazing on Links. Like, it was a, you know, at the time, probably the best looking video game that had been made and scaled down pretty nicely to Links. So maybe not that much fun, but impressive. Let's see what else was there, kicks or Quicks, if you prefer, the old Taito screen controlling, yeah, territory. There was a really cool version of that on Game Boy that I actually recommend over the Links version. Just because it has like this weird Mario element. into it when you, you know, when you get certain scores, then you see, like, Mario playing mariachi music and stuff. It's very strange, but kind of interesting, whereas kicks on Links is pretty much just the arcade game. Ishido, the Way of Stones, I don't even know what that game is. I've seen it. I used to own it, but it doesn't stick in my memory at all, but I know it was on there. A personal favorite

of Jazz's Robotron. Did you play the Robotron Port on Links? Yeah, it was kind of weird because it was a really good conversion, technically, but trying to play it using the buttons was just horrible. It didn't play particularly well. You had one button to move and one button rather to shoot. And it would shoot in the direction you were pointing in, right? So unlike the dual stick

nature of Robitron. But the Lynx was ambidextrous, right? Oh, but it didn't have two deep pads. Yeah, just one, unfortunately. So it made it very frustrating to play. I remember sitting down and, you know, I was so excited to play it. I started to play it

just there was that sort of immediate moment of realization of, oh, it just doesn't really play like a twin stick game because it doesn't have two sticks. And just wishing that there was a way of sort of, you know, adding another controller to the links. But, yeah, it just didn't work particularly well. But it was a great conversion, probably the best one of the home conversions. I mean, those arcade conversions for the links were a lot of fun from the Atari games of that era. Right? So, Stun Runner and Hidding, I didn't remember really playing, liking Hydra, which is, you know, quarter muncher. This is great for a couple minutes, not a game you want to pay, you know, 40 or 50 bucks for, but the actual conversion itself was a lot of fun.

I think they even had, like, voice samples, too, for some of the games. Yeah, I remember playing joust. I think that was one of the better conversions that was pretty much spot on and, you know, perfect for the controls, for the buttons that they, the links had. And, you know, they pretty much nailed that one perfectly. I put a lot of time into that. The game was also seven years old by that time. I think that was also part of the reason why it didn't have a huge amount of appeal because when Atari would market the links and they would stick up a bunch of games, a lot of those games were, in fact, quite old by that time and people would have already played them on the Atari VCS or, you know, different home

versions on their computers or whatever. So I think, you know, the Game Boy had games that you haven't really played before. Yeah. There were definitely a lot of like these very old arcade ports on there. For whatever reason, Link's got a port of Pac-Land, which again was like seven years old and felt very, very dated. I mean, that game was almost kind of instantly dated. Super Mario Brothers came out a year later and Ghost and Goblins also and just completely

spanked Pac-Land. So it was kind of like this groundbreaking work that. instantly wasn't very much fun. Showed up on links for some reason. Likewise, Paperboy. A more recent kind of current contemporary arcade conversion, it actually got a port of Pit Fighter. You know, that was kind of a visual spectacle at the time

with its digitized graphics. Sort of before Mortal Kombat, there was Pit Fighter, kind of doing the same thing, but more primitively, I guess. So it is kind of like the links as this odd collection an assortment of some original games, some kind of current arcade games, and some very old arcade games. So it's kind of hard to know, like, who were they making this system for? Like, what was the target audience? Do you think it was older gamers, you know, because of the price and the style of game?

Maybe it was not so much at the Nintendo audience. It was more meant for people who were 10 years older than Nintendo kids. I don't know whether there was that much thought put into it. I think, you know, when you look at the history of the Amiga and the links as, you know, has developed in a similar kind of way, I just think you had a bunch of guys who were brilliant technically and were just making these systems that were so much further ahead of anything else at the time that they couldn't conceive that you wouldn't want to buy this system, you know. And so there was a, you know, a heavy element of that sort of, we're just building the cooler

system out there. It's going to be the best by far. Who's not going to buy this? It's interesting in terms of who was the audience because they did do that pink and blue his and hers links to systems for the Neiman Marcus catalog, which was always kind of like that high and like you buy the submarine or whatever it is. It feels like a Sky Mall item or something. Yeah. And so that catalog was aimed towards more affluent older buyers. And so I think they were just like, okay, this is a premium system.

We're going to make a pink and a blue one for some absurd price. I don't actually think they made it in production. There's prototypes of it. And then I think we mentioned earlier, I have a Marlboro team, Links 2, which is Red. And Marlboro, the cigarette company. And, of course, that's not something you're going to want to target towards kids. Right. Maybe if it were Camel.

Right. Yeah. So there is kind of this, like, strange ephemera around the links. Like, it's actually not too difficult to get games, you know, complete in box for the system. There are very few that are, like, super desirable. and because, actually, you know, I think it is a good, like, starting system for collectors because there are some good games on there. They're mostly, I don't know of any that are, like, super expensive.

They're pretty easy to get a hold of. It's a finite number, you know, six dozen games. You can do that. It's maybe a couple of years worth of tracking stuff down, wheeling and dealing, but versus, like, getting an entire NES or Sega Genesis set. It's probably the way to go. So there is kind of that cool element to it. You're going to find a lot of sealed games.

Maybe that speaks to the lifespan of the links. But when I was collecting for it, there are sealed games everywhere, which you don't really see with any other system. Are there like eight price tags on top of each other? Yeah, it's like the Hula Hoop from Hudson or proxy or something. A lot of times actually it's dead stock, right? I mean, they shipped it back and no one ever bought it. And so you can get like factory sealed cases of games just because no one ever bought them. So I guess just to wrap things up, we could talk a little bit about the afterlife of Atari Links.

It actually has a pretty good one. There are homebrew games. There were licensing things. So games that were kind of in development came out sort of unofficially. I don't know. Steve, can you talk more about that? Yeah. So I think the big change there was Hasbro acquired the rights somewhere along the lines

and put the software encryption and a lot of the tools into the public domain. So then it became very easy for people to make homebrew Atari links games. And obviously with anything Atari, there's tons of prototypes they get leaked. I don't know for some reason Atari is notorious for that. And so a lot of people took that unfinished code and either finished it themselves or were able to acquire the rights to do sort of a run. I think it was like telegames or something like that, did a bunch of releases for the links in sort of that second lifespan. And you're still seeing homebrew links games. One of the best is Zaku because it's like the one that I have.

Yeah, it's a Super Fighter team. So they actually did a cart run. So unlike a lot of the homebrews where it's like, you know, a chip that you kind of stick in your links, this actually looks like a real release. Yeah, it's basically a clone of Air Zonk. It's very similar in style. So if you like Air Zonk, then I think Zaku is definitely one to look for. Kind of a cartoonish side-scrolling shooter, very wacky, big boss sprites.

and everything. Yeah, they, I think, did a limited runs, but you can still find them. I mean, like... Yeah, I bought it, like, a year ago direct from Superfighter team, so I think it's still out there, like, being sold legitimately. I don't know. Maybe at this point it's not, but, again, I don't think Links is necessarily, like, the system that collectors are clamoring to get, so it is a kind of a good entry point

to collecting a complete run of a console or something. It definitely is one that needs, I think, maybe a little more love and attention, and I'm hoping to get a hold of an RGB modded links at some point now that that kind of that hack exists in public and you can buy them because it would be kind of a fun companion piece to Game Boy World. I don't think there's quite as much history, certainly not as many games to deal with, but, you know, it could be a little companion piece or something. So I hope to do my part to bring a little more love to the links. Yeah, for a long time, you couldn't really do much in terms of mods for the links because of that wacky resolution. I-160 by 102. So there's no screen that would fit in there.

But then, yeah, someone did a VGA and now an RGB mod, so you can actually get a much better screen. Like before, all you'd have to do is, like, pull the fluorescent tube out of the links and replace it with LEDs or something to try to increase battery life. But, yeah, now there are a lot better options. So, you know, maybe we'll see sort of people getting into modded lynxes. So any final thoughts on links before we wrap it up? I'm surprised we got this much out of links. I'd never expected it. Having never really played it before, there's a lot to it.

Yeah, it's, like I said at the beginning, it is a really interesting little system, a unique part of video game history. And again, on its own, maybe not that much to talk about, but as kind of this counterpart to Game Boy, where you can sort of study it and say, what did each of these systems do right? Why was one a greater success than the other? I think there's a lot that can be learned from it. And I don't think really, as many game console manufacturers do learn from LinkedIn. as they should. I mean, Sony continues to sort of compete on the premium side. And, you know, we'll have a PSP episode soon. And the PSP actually did very well for itself. But I kind of feel like it did well for itself in spite of itself. And Vita, you know, just kind of doubled down on that and just was a disaster. So Nintendo just keeps applying that sort of last generation in portable form approach, like keep costs low. And anytime they've gotten away from that, with Virtual Boy, and even initially the 3DS, they've had a lot of trouble. So the portable market is just kind of this unique space.

And even now, as it's kind of morphed into mobile software, mobile hardware, it still kind of has its own requirements and needs. And I think that all goes back to the difference between Game Boy and Links. Yeah. I think there's an interesting lineage with RJ Michael and Dave Needle, you know, Amiga, and then the Links. And then they did the 3DO. kind of kept doubling down on the super cutting edge hardware. And then the odd thing is in 2003, I was invited to RJ Michael's house, and he was there with Dave Needle. And they sat in front of us and said, hey, we're thinking about doing another portable game system, which never turned into anything.

But it's interesting to think what would have happened if they would have tried to do cutting edge hardware in 2003. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, for me, the links is, it's a really interesting technical piece of hardware that was, you know, so, far ahead of its time, it sort of shows that the old adage that you still need software to sell a machine. It doesn't matter how good and how much advanced technology you might be using for a system. If you don't have great software to back it up, it's not worth anything. But also, I think, you know, there was an element of the links was also up against the game gear, which was a slightly cheaper alternative. And was the Turbo Express released

out in the States? 93, 92. Yeah, there was a later late. and kind of almost kind of its own different space in the market. Yeah, because in the UK you could import those. And I think with the links being quite expensive in the UK, people looked at the, you know, essentially a portable PC engine and just thought, well, I prefer to have one of those. If I want a really high end, the best there is, then this seems to be a better machine. So it just kind of got squeezed out, unfortunately, between sort of like the high end and the

low end. Yeah, I didn't think about the Turbo Express, the PC Engine GT, but, you know, given that the two, the links and the turbographics used pretty much the same chip. I wonder if, you know, the existence of the link made NEC say, you know, we could do that too. That's an interesting thought. I wonder if that was ever kind of a factor there. So I think that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts. We've talked for quite a while about the Atari Links. And I wanted to thank both Jazz and Steve for coming in this episode to share their thoughts. Cool. It's great to be here. Thank you. That's fun. Yeah. Thanks for sharing your perspectives on the system. For everyone else, I hope you'll, you know,

consider checking out the links because even though, like I said, I haven't spent a lot of time with it. I do have kind of a soft spot for the system that I've sort of grown into over the years. And, you know, obviously there's not as much of a story there as with Game Boy. But there is a story and it is something interesting to discover. And there are some pretty cool games. At the very least, you can, like, play Blue Lightning and think, can you imagine what this must have been like in 1989 if you weren't actually there? Like, holding a game that was basically Afterburner in your hands.

It's just, it's crazy. It was such an ambitious piece of hardware. So if nothing else, then it kind of highlights what was potentially possible at the furthest extreme of technology versus what was actually viable as a product. So, yeah, kind of like the DeLorean of video game systems without the cool gall wings. Anyway, so that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts. Thanks, everyone who has helped to support us. As usual, you can find future and current Retronauts.

projects and past Retronauts projects at Retronauts.com and on U.S.gamer.net. Steve, where can people find you on the internet? You can find me on Twitter at Stephen V. Lin. Very good. And Jazz, of course, is at Jazz Rignell, two L's, one Z. Bob's at Bob Serbo. Right. And I'm at GameSpite. Yeah, we'll just keep recording videos and audio podcasts and all sorts of things.

Thanks to supportive people like you. And enjoy some video games on the Atari links. Thanks. Thank you.