This list collects games made and published by Atari itself, the company behind the 2600. When the console, then called the Atari Video Computer System, went on sale in September 1977, it came with nine cartridges, among them Video Olympics, a collection of Pong-style paddle games, and Street Racer. Many early Atari games were also sold by the department store Sears under its Tele-Games label, sometimes with a different name.
Atari’s early programmers usually worked alone, and their names did not appear on the box. They still built many of the console’s best-known games. Rick Maurer’s Space Invaders (1980) was the first officially licensed arcade conversion for a home console, and 2600 sales rose sharply after it came out. Rob Fulop’s Missile Command (1981) hides his initials as an Easter egg. Tod Frye’s Pac-Man (1982) was heavily criticised but became the console’s best-selling cartridge, and Howard Scott Warshaw’s Yars’ Revenge (1982) was an original design.
After the 1983 crash, Atari was sold, and the new Atari Corporation kept supporting the 2600 for years. It released new games such as Doug Neubauer’s Solaris (1986), a space game often seen as a successor to Star Raiders, and finished older projects such as Bob Polaro’s Road Runner (1989).
Scroll through the list below and play Atari’s own games right here in your browser.
Double Dunk is a two-on-two, half-court basketball game released by Atari Corporation in 1989, one of the last new cartridges Atari made for the 2600. It was programmed by Matthew Hubbard, who had earlier written Dolphin for Activision.…
Play ▸Crystal Castles is Atari's 1984 home version of its own 1983 arcade maze game. You guide Bentley Bear through castles drawn at an angle, so the mazes look three-dimensional, and you gather every gem before the monsters get…
Play ▸Dark Chambers is a top-down maze shooter published by Atari in 1988 for the Atari 2600, and also released for the Atari 7800. It is a reworked version of Dandy, a 1983 Atari 8-bit computer game that John…
Play ▸Crazy Climber for the Atari 2600 is Atari's home version of the 1980 Nichibutsu arcade game, programmed by Alex Leavens and released in 1983. You scale the outside of four skyscrapers one window ledge at a time, dodging…
Play ▸Codebreaker is a 1978 Atari cartridge with two logic games: a number-guessing game in the style of the board game Mastermind, and the ancient strategy game Nim. Released in October 1978 alongside Brain Games and Hunt & Score,…
Play ▸Combat is one of the nine cartridges that launched the Atari Video Computer System (later the Atari 2600) in 1977. It came in the box with most Atari consoles until 1982, and Sears sold it under the name…
Play ▸Combat Two is the unreleased sequel to Combat, the tank duel that came packed with the Atari 2600 for years. According to AtariProtos, it was programmed in 1982 by Alan Hodgkinson and Tom Calderwood at General Computer Corporation…
Play ▸Computer Chess is an unreleased 1978 Atari prototype by Bob Whitehead and Larry Wagner. It is the early version of the program that Atari later shrank and sold as Video Chess. It never reached the shops, but it…
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