Third-party games are Atari 2600 cartridges made by companies other than Atari itself. That seems normal today, but in the late 1970s nobody outside a console maker published games for its machine. The change came from Atari’s own staff. In 1979 a group of its programmers, including David Crane, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, left to found Activision, the first independent console game developer. Atari sued, but the case was settled by 1982, with Activision paying royalties and the idea of third-party publishing left standing. Activision also printed its designers’ names on boxes and manuals, something Atari did not do.
Other companies followed quickly. Imagic, co-founded by former Atari programmer Rob Fulop, brought out games such as Riddle of the Sphinx (1982). Toy and film companies joined in too: Parker Brothers with Tutankham, Coleco with Zaxxon, and Mattel’s M Network with BurgerTime. Starpath went further with its Supercharger add-on, which loaded games such as Communist Mutants from Space from audio cassette and raised the console’s memory from 128 bytes to over 6 KB.
Activision’s own hits remain the best-known third-party games, including David Crane’s Pitfall! (1982) and Frostbite (1983). By 1983 so many publishers had flooded shops with cartridges, of very mixed quality, that the glut is often named as one cause of that year’s video game crash.
Browse the full list below and play games from dozens of publishers right here in your browser.
Rabbit Transit is a 1983 game by Starpath for the Starpath Supercharger, an add-on for the Atari 2600 that loaded games from audio cassettes. It was designed by Brian McGhie. You guide a rabbit across a busy meadow in a Frogger-like first stage, then hop around colour-changing ledges in a second stage that plays a lot like Q*bert. You can play it here in your browser, with no add-on or tape deck needed.
Racing Car is an obscure Atari 2600 racing cartridge released in Europe under the Home Vision label. Home Vision was a Belgian brand, used by the company VDI, for 2600 games made by the Taiwanese company Gem International Corporation. Very little is documented about this cartridge, but you can still try it here in your browser.
Racquetball is a 1982 sports game for the Atari 2600, programmed by Ed Salvo and published by Games by Apollo, a small company from Texas. Two players share an indoor court and try to keep a fast ball in play as it bounces off the front wall, the side walls and the ceiling. Shadows show where the ball is in the air, an ambitious idea for 1982. You can play it here in your browser, against the computer or a friend.
Radar is an unlicensed Atari 2600 cartridge sold in Canada by the Zellers department store chain. It is a renamed copy of the Taiwanese company Sancho’s shooter, better known on the site as Exocet and also sold as Cruise Missile. The title screen of this copy still shows Sancho’s 1982 copyright. You can play it here in your browser.
Raft Rider is a one-player white-water game for the Atari 2600, published by U.S. Games and developed by Western Technologies. You steer a log raft down a fast river, dodging rocks, moose and falling trees, and you try to grab gold nuggets along the way. The unusual part is the steering: you push the raft across the current with a pole. You can play it here in your browser.
Rampage for the Atari 2600 is Activision’s 1989 home version of Bally Midway’s 1986 arcade game, in which giant monsters climb skyscrapers and punch them until they fall down. The 2600 version was programmed by Bob Polaro, and it arrived late in the console’s life, long after the early-1980s boom. One or two players can take part. You can play it here in your browser.
Raumpatrouille (“Space Patrol”) is a space shoot-’em-up that the German mail-order company Quelle sold for the Atari 2600 around 1983. Like many cartridges in Quelle’s range, it was not a new game but one from another company with a German title. Here it is the same program that appeared elsewhere as UFO Patrol from Suntek and as X’Mission. Very little has been written about it, so it is mostly of interest to collectors of European releases. You can play it here in your browser.
Reactor is Parker Brothers’ Atari 2600 version of Gottlieb’s 1982 arcade game, designed by Tim Skelly. The home version was programmed by Charlie Heath. You pilot a small ship inside a nuclear reactor and bump swarms of particles into the walls before they push you into them. There is no shooting at all: everything depends on momentum and collisions, which makes it unlike most games of its time. You can play it here in your browser.
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.
Planet of the Apes is an unreleased Atari 2600 prototype from 1983, programmed by John Marvin for 20th Century Fox’s video game division. You play Colonel George Taylor, the astronaut from the 1968 film, fleeing an army of apes on the way to the Forbidden Zone. For years the surviving prototype was known under the wrong name. You can play it here in your browser.