Developer: VSS

VSS (Video Software Specialists) was a developer founded by Ed Salvo with programmers who had worked at Games by Apollo. It made games for several publishers, and the site has five:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1983, Wizard Video): you play the film’s villain, a theme that kept it off many shop shelves.
Halloween (1983, Wizard Video): a babysitter leads children to safety from a masked intruder.
Mountain King (1983, CBS Electronics): Salvo’s conversion of the computer game, with extra RAM in the cartridge.
Quest for Quintana Roo (Sunrise): a temple treasure hunt that demands planning.
Glacier Patrol (Telegames, 1988): melt alien ice blocks at the North Pole.

Choose a game below and play it in your browser.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a 1983 Atari 2600 game based on the 1974 horror film. It was developed by VSS, Inc., designed by Ed Salvo, and published by Wizard Video Games, a home video label that also released a 2600 game of Halloween. Unusually for its time, you play the film’s villain, Leatherface, rather than the people trying to escape. The game is better known for the controversy it caused and for being hard to find than for its gameplay, which makes it an interesting piece of video game history. You can play it here in your browser.

Quest for Quintana Roo

Quest for Quintana Roo is a treasure-hunting adventure for the Atari 2600, developed by VSS and published by Sunrise Software in the early 1980s. You play Yucatan Sam, an explorer searching an ancient temple in Mexico’s Quintana Roo for the map rocks that open its sealed vault. It asks for more thinking than most 2600 action games: you have to juggle tools, watch your air and remember where things are. You can play it here in your browser.

Mountain King

Mountain King is a platform game for the Atari 2600, where the player assumes the role of an explorer in search of a diamond mine and the temple of an ancient civilization. The objective is to discover and collect the Golden Crown and take it to the summit of the mountain. The mountain environment is … Read more

Halloween

Halloween is a 1983 Atari 2600 game based on John Carpenter’s 1978 horror film and published by Wizard Video. You play a babysitter who has to find frightened children in a dark house and lead them to safety while a masked intruder stalks the rooms. It is a tense chase game, and today one of the rarer 2600 cartridges. You can play it here in your browser.

Glacier Patrol

Glacier Patrol is a shooting game for the Atari 2600 set at the North Pole. Sunrise Software developed it but never released it, and Telegames finally put it out in 1988. Alien ice blocks float down on parachutes, and you melt them with your heat ray before they build up into a wall. You can play it here in your browser.