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.
Lock ‘n’ Chase is a cops-and-robbers maze game for the Atari 2600, published by Mattel Electronics in 1982 under its M Network label. It is a home version of Data East’s 1981 arcade game, and it plays a lot like Pac-Man, with one big difference: you can slam doors shut behind you to block the police. You can play it here in your browser.
London Blitz is a 1983 Atari 2600 puzzle and strategy game from Avalon Hill, the board game company, programmed by William J. Sheppard. Set in London during the Second World War, it puts you in the Royal Engineers, searching the streets of your sector for unexploded bombs and defusing them before the timer runs out. Each bomb is a small logic puzzle, and a wrong guess costs you precious seconds. You can play it here in your browser.
Looping is an unreleased 1983 Atari 2600 port of the arcade game of the same name, programmed by Ed Temple for Coleco. Coleco advertised it, but the cartridge never reached the shops, and the prototype stayed lost for twenty years until it turned up in 2003. Your plane can only climb and dive in loops, first over an airfield and then through a maze of pipes. It is fast, very hard and close to the ColecoVision version. You can play it here in your browser.
The Lord of the Rings: Journey to Rivendell is an unreleased Atari 2600 adventure game from Parker Brothers, programmed by Mark Lesser in 1983. Parker Brothers showed it in a 1983 catalog, but the cartridge never reached the shops. The prototype turned up in 2001 and proved to be almost finished. You lead Frodo from Hobbiton to Rivendell while the Black Riders hunt you. You can play the prototype here in your browser.
M.A.D., short for “Missile Attack and Defense”, is a missile-defence shooter for the Atari 2600 published by U.S. Games, the video game arm of the Quaker Oats Company. The cartridge carries a 1982 copyright. Waves of missiles gather in the sky above your civilisation’s six energy stations, and a single ground cannon is all that stands between them and the ground. Its best trick is the two-player mode, where a friend takes control of the attacking missiles instead of the computer. You can play it here in your browser.
M*A*S*H is an Atari 2600 game based on the film and the long-running TV series about a US Army field hospital in the Korean War. It was published by Fox Video Games, the game label of 20th Century Fox, and programmed by Doug Neubauer. As Hawkeye Pierce, you fly a helicopter to pick up wounded soldiers and then operate against the clock, racing your rival Frank Burns. You can play it here in your browser.
Malagai is a 1983 maze game for one or two players and the first Atari 2600 cartridge from Answer Software (model ASC 1001). You are a starship commander held on an alien starbase, and you escape by catching the right aliens in the right order to collect the airlock keys. It rewards herding and timing more than fast reflexes. Original cartridges are very hard to find, but you can play it here in your browser.
Kyphus is an unreleased Atari 2600 prototype from Apollo, programmed by Tim Martin around 1982. It was never sold, and the only known copy of the prototype surfaced in 2006. What survives is an early work in progress: a strange pseudo-3D maze with very little actual game in it, but a rare look at a project that was lost for more than twenty years. You can try it here in your browser.
Released as a 2-in-1 cart with Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em
Laser Blast is a 1981 Activision shooter designed by David Crane, one of the company’s founders. You fly a saucer over a planet’s surface and trade laser fire with three enemy ground bases at a time. It is a short-burst reflex game: the controls take seconds to learn, but the enemy aims faster and faster as you go. You can play it here in your browser.