Blue Lightning

Overview

Blue Lightning is a fighter-jet dog-fighting flight simulation game, developed by Epyx Games, the same company that designed and developed the Atari Lynx system. The game was published by Atari, and was released on the Atari Lynx.

The Atari Lynx version was released in 1989, and consisted of a single-player aerial dog-fighting campaign. The game was presented in 3rd person view as the player controlled a navy blue colored jet and engaged other jets in aerial combat.

Blue Lightning stood out as a first generation launch-game for the Atari Lynx; the game’s bright colors and clean visual style made the game a showcase piece for the new Lynx hardware. Many Atari Lynx demo displays in various toy stores and movie theatres across the United States were shown running a demo version of Blue Lightning. The game is also remembered for being one of the few Atari Lynx games to have a flat game cartridge, compared with most Atari Lynx game cartridges which have curved-back cartridge grips that allowed for easier insertion and removal from the Atari Lynx first generation hardware.

Atari Jaguar CD Version

In 1995, a remake of Blue Lightning, developed by Attention to Detail, was included as a pack-in game with the Atari Jaguar CD.