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.
Gyruss is Parker Brothers’ 1984 Atari 2600 version of Konami’s 1983 arcade shooter. Your ship circles the edge of the screen and fires in towards the centre, while enemy formations swirl out of deep space on your trip from Neptune back to Earth. The 2600 cartridge was programmed by Joe Gaucher, and it plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor throughout, which is unusual for the console. You can play it here in your browser.
H.E.R.O. (short for Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operation) is a 1984 Activision game designed by John Van Ryzin. You play Roderick Hero, a rescuer with a small helicopter strapped to his back, who flies down through a maze of mine shafts to reach trapped miners. Each level is a compact puzzle of walls, creatures and lava that you solve a little faster every time. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Halloween is a 1983 Atari 2600 game based on John Carpenter’s 1978 horror film and published by Wizard Video. You play a babysitter who has to find frightened children in a dark house and lead them to safety while a masked intruder stalks the rooms. It is a tense chase game, and today one of the rarer 2600 cartridges. You can play it here in your browser.
Harbor Escape is an Atari 2600 cartridge released in North America by Panda around 1983. It is not an original game but a modified copy of Activision’s River Raid, with the jet turned into a submarine and the fuel depots turned into air tanks. If you know River Raid, you will feel at home at once. You can play it here in your browser.
Great Escape is a 1983 space shooter for the Atari 2600, sold under the Bomb label, a range of cartridges from the Asian developer Onbase. Your ship sits in the middle of the screen while space scrolls around it in four directions, and you shoot meteorites and aliens while using two radar scanners to keep away from a deadly Super Alien. This page has the NTSC cartridge; the PAL version is on this site as Great Escape (Europe). You can play it here in your browser.
Ghostbusters for the Atari 2600 is Activision’s 1985 cartridge version of the game based on the 1984 film. David Crane designed the original for the Commodore 64, and Dan Kitchen converted it to the 2600, keeping most of its mix of business management, driving and ghost trapping while simplifying the graphics. It reached North American shops in October 1985. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Glacier Patrol is a shooting game for the Atari 2600 set at the North Pole. Sunrise Software developed it but never released it, and Telegames finally put it out in 1988. Alien ice blocks float down on parachutes, and you melt them with your heat ray before they build up into a wall. You can play it here in your browser.
Glib, subtitled Video Word Game, is a 1983 word-building game published by Selchow & Righter, the company behind the Scrabble board game, and developed by Qualtronic Devices (QDI). You pick up lettered tiles with a joystick-controlled cursor and arrange them into words against the clock, with letter values and bonus squares that will feel familiar to Scrabble players. It had very limited distribution and is now a rare cartridge. You can play it here in your browser.
Go Go Home Monster is a 1983 maze game for the Atari 2600, sold in Europe under the Home Vision label. The game was developed by Gem International Corporation, and the same cartridge also appeared as Alien’s Return, Col ‘N and E.T. Go Home. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Gopher is a farmyard action game for the Atari 2600, developed by James Wickstead Design Associates and published by U.S. Games in January 1983. Sylvia Day designed and programmed it. You play a farmer with a shovel, defending three carrots from a gopher that tunnels under the field and pops up to steal them. It plays a bit like a Whac-A-Mole machine, with a clever duck added to the mix. You can play it here in your browser.