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.
All four games are below, ready to play in your browser.
Berzerk is a multidirectional shooter video game that was initially released for arcades in 1980 and later for the Atari 2600 in 1982. The game was developed by Stern Electronics and designed by Alan McNeil. Berzerk places the player in the role of a human fighting his way through a maze of interconnected rooms filled … Read more
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 get through short action tests. Leave the right objects in the right room and the game shows a pair of numbers that point to a page and panel in the DC comic book packed with the cartridge, where a word was hidden for Atari’s prize contest. The contest ended long ago, but the puzzle is still there to explore. You can play it here in your browser.
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 them away. Its best feature is the two-player mode, where both brothers are on screen at once and can help or sabotage each other. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
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 largely playable, with a few rough edges. It is a rare chance to see a 2600 arcade conversion that almost made it. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.