A racing game on a pocket console that wasn't afraid to try a real cockpit perspective was quite a piece of nerve in its year of release. Checkered Flag for the Atari Lynx offered exactly that and made use of the hardware tricks the console was proud of.
Instead of a plain top-down view, the game sat you in a pseudo-3D race from the driver's perspective. The Lynx's rotating screen, sprite scaling and the effort to create an illusion of depth were meant to evoke the feeling that you really were sitting behind the wheel, hurtling down the track. The goal is to drive the circuits, overtake rivals and deliver that proverbial checkered finish flag first.
The Lynx had an ace up its sleeve called ComLynx, a cable link between multiple consoles, and racing games were exactly the genre where shared play made the most sense. Competing with a friend on the console next to you had an entirely different charge than beating artificial intelligence.
It's fair to say that the ambition here sometimes outran the hardware's capabilities and the sense of driving wasn't always as smooth as a player might have wished. Even so, Checkered Flag remains an interesting testament to how seriously Atari took the Lynx's technical capabilities and how it tried to offer experiences the competition on monochrome displays couldn't.
Today it's a title mainly for platform enthusiasts and collectors who want to taste what attempts at realistic racing looked like on a pocket console at the start of the nineties. As a historical artifact it has its charm.
Why play: For a look into the cockpit from an era when pocket consoles weren't afraid to dream of real 3D racing, and the Lynx gave it a full-hearted try.
Game 22 of 30 for Atari Lynx
