Next up is a short entry for a potential prototype to try and find, thanks to Ross Sillifant for highlighting. When you take a look at the original Tecmo arcade, and various home conversions – you will notice that pretty much all (we haven’t checked every single format) have 5 power-up slots in total. All that is except for the Atari Lynx version:
Above you can see there are only 4 power up slots, which is fair enough – the Lynx has a smaller screen compared to other formats, so a reasonable thing.
However, take a peak at the screenshots of Rygar in some press releases, on a Lynx box and on the back of the actual Lynx release itself (see scans below thanks to AtariAge and https://comics.ha.com/), you’ll notice that there were indeed 5 slots at one point:
It seems that more space was required for the lives and score area, so it was decided to remove one during development. We wonder what other changes may have occurred?
Hopefully some day we will get to hear from developer Lou Haehn to get an insight, and maybe an earlier prototype will be discovered that shows more differences to the final release.
With thanks to Ross Sillifant for highlighting.
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