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.
Eli’s Ladder is an educational Atari 2600 cartridge from Simage, a small company in Novato, California. It is a set of counting, addition and subtraction drills for young children, built around Eli, a friendly alien who climbs a ladder into his spaceship each time a sum is answered correctly. It was sold in very small numbers and is one of the rarest 2600 cartridges today. You can play it here in your browser.
Encounter at L-5 is a paddle-controlled space shooter from Data Age, released in 1982 as one of the company’s first five Atari 2600 cartridges. A space colony beyond the Moon’s orbit is under attack by the Megalytes, and your antimatter launcher is its only defence. An unusual aiming system, with a cursor that your launcher jumps to, sets it apart from other shooters of the time. You can play it here in your browser.
Enduro is a 1983 racing game by Activision, designed by Larry Miller. You drive in the “National Enduro”, a long-distance race where you have to overtake a set number of cars every day to stay in the competition. The race runs through day and night, snow, ice and fog, and the changing light and weather on a 4 KB cartridge are what still make it stand out among 2600 racing games. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
The Entity is an unreleased Atari 2600 game from 20th Century Fox, programmed by Mark Klein and based on the horror film of the same name. Instead of fighting the film’s invisible force, you push it: by sliding walls into place, you force a bouncing Entity up through a series of planes of existence. It is a small, unusual puzzle-action prototype, and you can play it here in your browser.
Entombed is a 1983 maze game for the Atari 2600, developed by Western Technologies and published by U.S. Games. Tom Sloper designed it and Steve Sidley programmed it. You are an archaeologist trapped in catacombs full of zombies, inside a maze that never stops scrolling and is never the same twice. Decades later its maze-building routine puzzled researchers, which makes it one of the more talked-about 2600 cartridges today. You can play it here in your browser.
Dragon Defender is a horizontal shoot ’em up for the Atari 2600 from the unlicensed Taiwanese cartridge scene of the early 1980s. It was sold in Europe and Australia by several labels, including Ariola, Suntek and Rainbow Vision, and the version on this page is the European PAL release. You fly a dragon and shoot down waves of enemies coming from the right. It is a simple, obscure game, and an interesting look at the budget cartridges of the time. You can play it here in your browser.
Demolition Herby is a 1983 Atari 2600 game from Telesys, a small publisher in Fremont, California, programmed by Don Ruffcorn. You steer Herby, a little green car, around a grid of white lines, painting them red to black out the squares, while chase cars try to undo your work and ram you off the track. It plays like a demolition-derby take on Amidar, and a second player can take over the chase cars. You can play it here in your browser.
Demon Attack is a 1982 shoot-’em-up for the Atari 2600, designed and programmed by Rob Fulop and published by Imagic. From a laser cannon on an ice planet, you shoot down waves of flapping, colourful demons that swoop, split in two and dive at you. It was one of the best-selling 2600 games of 1982, became Imagic’s biggest hit and won the Arcade Award for Video Game of the Year. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Depth Charge is an unreleased 1983 Atari 2600 submarine game, programmed by Jerry Lawson’s company Videosoft for Amiga, the firm that later built the Amiga computer. You look through a periscope at ships sailing across the horizon and try to sink as many as you can before your torpedoes run out. It plays a lot like the arcade game Sea Wolf. The game was never sold at the time, and you can play the surviving version here in your browser.
Dice Puzzle is a quiet one-player logic game for the Atari 2600 from 1983. This page runs the European PAL cartridge, which carries the Sancho name (the label of Tang’s Electronic Co.) and shows “© Sancho 1983” on screen. The same game was sold in North America by Panda; you can play that NTSC version on the Dice Puzzle (USA) page. There are no enemies and no reflex tests here, just sixteen dice and one goal: make every one of them show a six. You can play it here in your browser.