Game origin: homebrew

Homebrew games are new Atari 2600 games made by hobbyists, long after the console left the shops. They are written for the original hardware and follow its old rules: 128 bytes of RAM, a tiny graphics chip and, in many cases, the standard 4 KB cartridge size of the early 1980s. Many are sold as real cartridges with boxes and printed manuals, often through the fan site AtariAge, and they run on an original console as well as in an emulator.
The modern scene began in the mid-1990s, when Ed Federmeyer made SoundX, a cartridge for experimenting with the console’s sound. Emulators such as Stella made testing easier, and batari Basic later let people write 2600 games without learning 6502 assembly language.
Homebrew covers everything from arcade conversions that never existed in the 1980s to completely new ideas:

Thrust (2000): Thomas Jentzsch’s version of the home computer game about steering a ship against gravity.
Qb (2001): Andrew Davie’s block-sliding puzzle, first written for the Atari 800.
Lady Bug (2006): John W. Champeau’s version of the arcade maze game, with its swinging gates.
Medieval Mayhem (2006): Darrell Spice Jr.’s castle battle for up to four paddle players, based on Warlords.
Halo 2600 (2010): Ed Fries imagines Halo as a 1982 cartridge, all in 4 KB.
Boulder Dash (2011): a licensed conversion of the digging game, nearly ten years in the making.

Browse the list below and try these new games for an old console right here in your browser.