Development and release
Blue Lightning was conceived by Arthur Koch and Stephen Landrum as part of a commission to design a pseudo-3D combat flight title for the then-upcoming Handy handheld game console, which would be later rechristened as the Atari Lynx.[3] During their free time, the team would visit local arcades as sources of inspirations for their upcoming projects, among them being Sega's After Burner, which served as a basis for their combat flight game and although Landrum was initially influenced by Spectrum HoloByte's Falcon, Koch lean towards a more arcade-style approach rather than a full simulation one.[3] Koch stated that Landrum's first idea for the project was of a first-person shooter, with the action being viewed on a first-person perspective inside of the plane's cockpit, however he created all the views to be animated at a third-person angle and as a result, Landrum scaled down all of the assets in order to fit within the memory constrains and make it a third-person shooter instead.[3]
Once design of the project was finalized, programmer Chuck Sommerville came up with the title after writing it on a paper, which was likely inspired by the film and TV series Blue Thunder, and gave it to designer RJ Mical, who liked the name.[3] Koch recounted positively about the development process of the title and working with the hardware, stating he and Landrum had a lot of freedom to develop the game they wanted with the available technology, however he also stated that the Lynx's limited screen resolution proved to be a source of difficulty for the team.[3]
Blue Lightning makes heavy use of several features found within the Lynx hardware such as sprite scaling and rotation, with Sommerville developing an animation engine for the introductory sequence of the game, which would later be re-used on other titles for the system such as Electrocop and Todd's Adventures in Slime World.[3] Sommerville stated the game violated a rule of the system imposed by Mical and co-designer Dave Needle, which involved not accessing the ROM image once a game was running, as it streamed data for assets directly from the ROM and this technique would also be re-used in Zarlor Mercenary.[3]
Blue Lightning was one of the original launch titles during the initial release of the Lynx in 1989, along with California Games, the aforementioned Electrocop and Gates of Zendocon. It was also released in Europe around the same time period and later in Japan on December 1 of the same year, where it was distributed by Mumin Corporation instead and the difference between the international and Japanese releases is that the latter came bundled with an instruction manual in Japanese.[1][2][6] The game was first showcased to the public during the International Summer Consumer Electronics Show 1989, along with the system.[7] Early previews showcased a different GUI.[8]
