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.
Peter Penguin is a European PAL release by ITT Family Games from 1983. It is not an original game but a relabelled version of Frisco, a block-pushing game in the style of the arcade game Pengo that Home Vision also sold in Europe. The title screen carries only the credit “R.J.P.G.” and the year 1983. You can play it here in your browser.
Phantom UFO is a cartridge from Bit Corporation, a Taiwanese company that made Atari 2600 games and console clones in the 1980s. It is listed as a version of Spider Fighter, the 1983 Activision shooter designed by Larry Miller, sold under a different name. Its exact release date is not documented. You can play it here in your browser.
Phantom-Panzer is the German release of Phantom Tank, a tank battle game made by the Taiwanese company Bit Corporation. The mail-order firm Quelle sold it through its catalogue as a PAL cartridge. You defend your base against a column of enemy tanks that fade in and out of view, so you can never be quite sure where the next shot will come from. You can play it here in your browser.
Sea Monster – O Monstro Marinho is the Brazilian release of Sea Monster, a simple shooting game made by the Taiwanese company Bit Corporation. It was sold in Brazil by CCE, a company that put out many 2600 games there under Portuguese titles. It is not a prototype: it is a finished cartridge with a translated name. You command a ship on the surface and drop depth charges on the creatures below. You can play it here in your browser.
Ocean City Defender is an unlicensed copy of Imagic’s 1982 shooter Atlantis, sold in Canada by the Zellers department store chain. Like the other Zellers cartridges, it was made in Taiwan and given a new name. The game underneath is Dennis Koble’s Atlantis with a few cosmetic changes: you still guard an underwater city with three fixed cannons against waves of attacking ships. You can play it here in your browser.
The Official Frogger is Starpath’s 1983 version of Konami’s arcade game, programmed by Stephen H. Landrum. It was not sold on a cartridge but on a cassette tape for the Starpath Supercharger, an add-on that plugged into the Atari 2600’s cartridge slot and loaded games from an ordinary cassette player. The extra memory let Starpath get much closer to the arcade look and sound than the better-known Parker Brothers cartridge. You can play it here in your browser, with no tape loading needed.
Omega Race is the Atari 2600 version of Midway’s 1981 vector-graphics arcade game, in which you fly a fighter around a rectangular arena and shoot down waves of enemy ships. CBS Electronics released it in 1983, and the manual says it was programmed for CBS by Bally Midway. It came with a special controller add-on, the Booster Grip, which gave the joystick separate buttons for thrust and fire. You can try it here in your browser, but read the control notes first.
Out of Control is a 1983 space race against the clock for the Atari 2600. It was designed by Jim Jacob and published by The Avalon Hill Video Game Company, the video game arm of the board game publisher. There is nothing to shoot. You race a drifting spaceship around a course of buoys and balloons, then dock it. You can play it here in your browser.
Pac Kong is a European PAL cartridge from 1983, released by Goliath and Hot Shot with the catalogue number 83-414. Despite the name, it is neither Pac-Man nor Donkey Kong. The game on the cartridge is the one better known as Inca Gold, a Funvision title that turned up under many different names. You can play it here in your browser with the standard joystick.
No Escape! is a 1983 Atari 2600 action game from Imagic, designed by Michael Greene. You play Jason of the Argonauts, locked in the Temple of Aphrodite by the gods of Olympus while flying Furies attack. The twist is that you must not hit the Furies directly: you knock bricks down on them from the temple roof. You can play it here in your browser.