Developer: Dan Hitchens
Dan Hitchens was a programmer at Atari in the early 1980s, and he worked mostly on bringing arcade games home to the 2600.
His Berzerk port came out in August 1982, and his Mario Bros. followed in 1983, a two-player pipe-clearing game that sold about 1.59 million cartridges. Elevator Action, his version of Taito’s spy game, was never finished: an internal memo from August 1984 called it 85% done, and it was only sold in 2001, as a small boxed run at Classic Gaming Expo. The credit for Swordquest: Earthworld is less certain. AtariProtos names Hitchens as programmer, while other sources credit Tod Frye with the whole Swordquest series.
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Swordquest: Earthworld
Swordquest: Earthworld is the first of Atari's three Swordquest adventure games for the 2600, released in October 1982. You wander through twelve rooms named after the signs of the zodiac, carry magical objects from room to room and…
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Mario Bros.
Mario Bros. is Atari's 1983 Atari 2600 version of Nintendo's arcade game from the same year. Mario and his brother Luigi clear pests out of a set of water pipes by knocking them over from below and kicking…
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Elevator Action
Elevator Action for the Atari 2600 is an unreleased prototype. Dan Hitchens programmed it at Atari as a home version of Taito's 1983 arcade spy game, but the cartridge was never finished or sold. The surviving version is…
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