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.
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.
My Golf is a golf game for one or two players, programmed by David Lubar at Imagineering and released in 1990 by HES, a company from Sydney, Australia. It came out very late in the Atari 2600’s life and only in the PAL TV format, which is why few players outside Australia and Europe ever saw it. For a 2600 game it is surprisingly complete: 18 holes that stretch over several screens, a full bag of clubs, wind, and hooks and slices. You can play it here in your browser.
A Mysterious Thief is a 1983 Atari 2600 game in which you play a burglar raiding a four-storey building against the clock. The version on this page is an NTSC prototype, and only one copy is known. The game itself did come out in Europe under other names, and it is now thought to be an American game by Zimag or Vidco. You can play the prototype here in your browser.
Night Stalker on the Atari 2600 is a later reissue of Dark Cavern, the maze shooter Mattel Electronics released under its M Network label in 1982. Telegames brought it back for the PAL market in the late 1980s and gave it the name of the Intellivision game it was adapted from. The gameplay is the same as Dark Cavern: you roam an underground maze, shoot robots and try not to run out of bullets. You can play it here in your browser.
Nightmare is a single-screen climbing game released in 1983 by Sancho (Tang’s Electronic Co.), a small third-party publisher. A sleeping child is stuck in a bad dream and has to reach a rescue helicopter by climbing magic ropes, while birds, floating faces, balloons and a snake get in the way. It is an unusual, dreamlike game from a lesser-known corner of the 2600 library. You can play it here in your browser.
Montezuma’s Revenge is a platform adventure in which explorer Panama Joe works his way down through the chambers of an Aztec emperor’s fortress, collecting keys, tools and jewels. Robert Jaeger created the original game, and Parker Brothers published it on several systems in 1984. The Atari 2600 cartridge was adapted by Wickstead Design. It is a tough game that rewards you for learning the fortress room by room. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Moonsweeper is a 1983 space rescue game for the Atari 2600, programmed by Bob Smith and published by Imagic. You fly the USS Moonsweeper around a sun, dodge the debris it throws at you, then dive down to passing moons to pick up stranded miners. It packs two kinds of play into one cartridge: a fixed-screen shooter in orbit and a fast, pseudo-3D flight over the moon’s surface. You can play it here in your browser.
Motocross is a little-known motorbike racing game for the Atari 2600. The German mail-order company Quelle sold it in Europe around 1983, and the same title also appeared on cartridges made in Taiwan and sold under other labels. Who wrote the game is not known. It is a simple, one-player race seen from above, with a fuel gauge to watch. You can play it here in your browser.
Motocross Racer is an off-road motorcycle racing game from Xonox, the cartridge label of K-tel. It packs three short races into one cartridge, each seen from a different angle: behind the bike in the desert, from above on a mountain road, and from the side on a beach. Your aim is the lowest total time, and every crash leaves the bike a little slower. You can play it here in your browser.