[1][2] It was one of the launch titles that were released along with the system in North America and was jointly written by Stephen Landrum, lead programmer Brian Bowhay, who also developed the Lynx hardware and Chip's Challenge creator Chuck Sommerville.

Blue Lightning is an arcade-style combat flight simulation game that is played from a third-person perspective similar to After Burner, where the player take the role of a fighter pilot with one main objective; to enter into enemy territory and aid the allies in defeating the enemies to claim victory of the war by completing a series of nine missions, each one taking place in various locations and tasking the player with different assignments, while increasing in difficulty as the game progress further.

[4][5] 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] 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.

"[28] In a 1999 retrospective, Robert A Jung reviewed the Atari Lynx version of the game for IGN, stating in his verdict that, "Though the levels could use a little more variety, the user-friendly gameplay and the sensational graphics make this title a blue-ribbon winner.