California Games was the best reason to own an Atari Lynx. Fortunately, it came free with the system!

The Greatest Epyx

During the '80s, California Games developer Epyx was extremely well known among gamers, not just for its series of sports games, but also for traditional action titles like Impossible Mission, Jumpman, and a game based on G.I. Joe for the Apple II and Commodore 64. Epyx developed games for multiple computer platforms, including DOS-based PCs, the ColecoVision, and the Amiga, but always seemed partial to Atari's systems--it developed for the Atari 2600, the 7800, and the Atari ST, as well as the Lynx. California Games for the Lynx is actually one of the last games to bear the Epyx brand name.

The BMX biking mode had an insane level of depth.

A full decade before Tony Hawk's Pro Skater reinvigorated (and more or less invented) the alternative sports genre, an ahead-of-its-time portable game system called the Atari Lynx was released together with a version of a game called California Games bundled in. Though California Games had previously been released on various computer and gaming platforms, the Lynx version of the game was built from the ground up to support the portable system's unique technical features. More importantly, it was insanely fun if you bothered to scratch beneath the surface of its apparent simplicity. There, you'd find a game--nay, four different games--featuring Tony Hawk-style levels of depth. And did we mention you could have been playing this game on the go, 15 years ago?

California Games featured four different game types: BMX biking, footbag, half-pipe, and surfing. Each of these qualified as an easy-to-pick-up, hard-to-put-down type of game, though some players mistook the seeming simplicity of each game type as a limitation. In fact, these games each featured a well-balanced scoring system and a surprisingly deep learning curve.

With practice, you could continually earn higher and higher scores, soar to greater and greater heights, and pull off stunts that seemed impossible. Much of this was, in fact, possible due to the Lynx's unique design, which allowed for scaling and rotation of 2D sprites--a technology that became extremely popular on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System some years later. California Games may not look like much today, but for its time, it featured surprisingly good, colorful graphics that far eclipsed those that could be found on the drab, black-and-white Game Boy, the Lynx's obvious competitor.

Indeed, the Atari Lynx did not succeed in the long run for various reasons. One of those reasons might have been that few of its games turned out to have the lasting appeal of California Games. This is one of those games whose depth seems almost unintentional--just when you thought you'd seen it all, you'd discover some new way of tweaking the controls just so in order to catch a little more air, score a few more points, and completely renew your interest in the whole experience. Better yet, California Games featured a two-player mode, allowing players to link up and compete against each other.

Talk to the handful of those privileged to have played California Games, and they'll all tell you that a different one of the minigames was their favorite. Mine happened to be the BMX game, which I played religiously for I can't remember how long. I was a little late to the whole Tony Hawk party and only really got on board with that series with the third installment, and the addictiveness of those games always makes me think back to good old California Games.