Andrew Fuchs worked on Atari 2600 games at Atari in the early 1980s, mostly on sound. He is not the main programmer of any game on this page: each was built by a small team, with Fuchs handling the audio and, on one cartridge, the graphics as well.
The site has five games he worked on. Stargate is Bill Aspromonte’s version of the Williams arcade sequel to Defender, and Fuchs did both its graphics and sound. The same cartridge was later sold again as Defender II. He made the sound for Millipede with Robert Vieira, and for Pengo and Obelix with Jeff Gusman. Pengo was one of the first 2600 games built by a team rather than a single programmer.
All five are below, ready to play in your browser.
Stargate is Atari’s 2600 version of the 1981 Williams arcade sequel to Defender, created by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar of Vid Kidz. Bill Aspromonte programmed the cartridge and Andrew Fuchs did the graphics and sound. You fly across a scrolling planet, shooting aliens and protecting the humanoids they try to carry away. It is unusual for the 2600 because it uses two joysticks at once: one to fly and one for the special weapons. You can play it here in your browser.
Pengo is Atari’s 1984 Atari 2600 version of the 1982 arcade game made by Coreland and released by Sega. You are a small penguin on a field of ice blocks, and your job is to crush the blob-like Sno-Bees by kicking blocks into them. It is a maze game where you reshape the maze yourself, which makes it feel quite different from Pac-Man and its many imitators. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Obelix is a 1983 Atari 2600 game starring the Gaulish heroes of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s comics. Despite the title you play both friends at once: you steer little Asterix, who stuns Roman soldiers, and press the button to make Obelix drop his menhir on them. It was programmed by Suki Lee at Atari and sold mainly in Europe. Unlike Atari’s earlier Asterix cartridge, which was a reworked version of Taz, Obelix is an original game. You can play it here in your browser.
Millipede is the Atari 2600 version of Atari’s 1982 arcade sequel to Centipede. It was released in 1984, programmed by Dave Staugas with graphics by Jerome Domurat. As in Centipede, you shoot at a segmented bug winding down through a field of mushrooms, but here it has far more company: spiders, bees, beetles, earwigs, inchworms, mosquitoes and dragonflies, plus DDT bombs you can set off. You can play it here in your browser.
Defender II is Atari’s Atari 2600 version of Stargate, the 1981 arcade sequel to Defender designed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar and released by Williams. The 2600 cartridge, programmed by Bill Aspromonte with sound by Andrew Fuchs, first came out as Stargate and was later sold again under the Defender II name. It is the same game on both labels. It is fast and busy, and it uses two joysticks to fit in all of the arcade ship’s special weapons. You can play it here in your browser.