Warren Robinett joined Atari in November 1977. His three 2600 cartridges are all on the site. Slot Racers (1978), his first, is a two-player chase through city streets with missiles that turn corners. Adventure (1980), a graphical take on the text game Colossal Cave Adventure, sends you after a chalice past dragons and a thieving bat. Because Atari did not credit its designers, Robinett hid a secret room with his name in it, one of the earliest video game Easter eggs. BASIC Programming is a tiny programming language, though its keypads are not emulated here.
He left Atari in 1979 and founded The Learning Company in 1980. Pick a cartridge below and play it in your browser.
Slot Racers is a two-player chase game that Atari released for the 2600 in 1978. It was the first game Warren Robinett designed at Atari, before he went on to make Adventure. Two cars race around a maze of city streets and try to hit each other with missiles fired from their headlights. Sears sold the same cartridge under the name Maze. You can play it here in your browser.
BASIC Programming is not a game but a small programming language on a cartridge. Warren Robinett wrote it for Atari at the same time as he was finishing Adventure, and Atari released it for the 2600 in 1980. It is one of the very few non-game cartridges for the console and a fascinating example of how much people tried to squeeze out of a machine with only 128 bytes of RAM. You can load it here in your browser, but read the note below first.
Adventure, developed by Warren Robinett for the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed Atari 2600) and released in 1980, is notable for containing the first well-known Easter egg in a video game, which revealed the designer’s name. The Easter egg can be found by performing a specific sequence of actions within the game. When the … Read more