Adventure games on the Atari 2600 are about exploring: moving from screen to screen, finding objects, working out what they are for and reaching a goal hidden somewhere in the game world. Early home computers told adventures in text, but the 2600 had no keyboard and only 128 bytes of RAM, so its designers turned the idea into pictures. Each screen became a room, items became small shapes you could pick up with the fire button, and a joystick replaced typed commands.
Warren Robinett’s Adventure (1980) set the pattern, with castles, keys, dragons and a hidden room carrying his name, one of the best-known early Easter eggs. John Dunn’s Superman spread a whole city across connected screens, and James Andreasen’s Haunted House (1982) left you in the dark with only matches for light.
Later games grew more ambitious. Howard Scott Warshaw’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) used a second joystick just to manage Indy’s inventory, and Swordquest: Earthworld (1982) came with a comic book full of clues for a prize contest run by Atari. Starpath’s Escape from the Mindmaster loaded from cassette through the Supercharger add-on, which gave the console far more memory. Modern hobbyists still work in the genre too: Duck Attack! is a 2010 homebrew by Will Nicholes.
Pick a game from the list below and start exploring right here in your browser.
Riddle of the Sphinx is an action-adventure game designed by Bob Smith and released by Imagic in August 1982. As a young prince of Egypt, you travel through a desert kingdom cursed by Anubis, fight off thieves and scorpions, collect treasures and work out which offerings the temples want. It asks you to think, not just shoot, and it makes clever use of the console’s switches to fit a whole inventory system onto a one-button machine. You can play it here in your browser.
Swordquest: Waterworld is the third and last of Atari’s Swordquest adventure games for the 2600, programmed by Tod Frye. Like Earthworld and Fireworld, it asks you to place magical objects in the right rooms to reveal clues that pointed into a DC comic book, the key to a contest with a jewelled crown as the prize. Waterworld was first sold only to members of the Atari Club, and it is the rarest of the three cartridges today. You can play it here in your browser.
Survival Island is a 1983 action-adventure by Starpath, programmed by Scott Nelson. It was not sold as a normal cartridge but on cassette tape for the Starpath Supercharger, an add-on that plugged into the Atari 2600’s cartridge slot, added 6 KB of memory and loaded games from an ordinary cassette player. After a shipwreck you must drift to an island, cross it and find the way through a temple maze. You can play it here in your browser, with no tape to load.
Sword of Saros is a 1983 dungeon adventure for the Starpath Supercharger, the add-on that let the Atari 2600 load bigger games from audio cassettes. Programmed by Jon Leupp and Stephen Landrum, it sends you through an evil wizard’s seven-level maze to collect the pieces of a magic sword and find the way out. Starpath sold it only by mail order after the company ran into financial trouble, so very few copies were made. You can play it here in your browser, with no tape to load.
Swordquest: Earthworld is the first of Atari’s three Swordquest adventure games for the 2600, released in October 1982. You wander through twelve rooms named after the signs of the zodiac, carry magical objects from room to room and get through short action tests. Leave the right objects in the right room and the game shows a pair of numbers that point to a page and panel in the DC comic book packed with the cartridge, where a word was hidden for Atari’s prize contest. The contest ended long ago, but the puzzle is still there to explore. You can play it here in your browser.
Swordquest: Fireworld is the second of Atari’s three Swordquest adventure games for the 2600, programmed by Tod Frye and released in early 1983. You explore ten rooms laid out like the Kabbalah Tree of Life, collect and drop magical objects, and pass short action tests. The right objects in the right room reveal a clue that points to a page and panel in the comic book that came in the box, where a word was hidden for Atari’s prize contest. The contest is long over, but the rooms, objects and tests are still there to work out. You can play it here in your browser.
Superman is an action-adventure game for the Atari 2600, programmed by John Dunn and released by Atari in 1979. Lex Luthor has blown up a bridge in Metropolis, and you, as Superman, must rebuild it, catch Luthor and his gang, and get back to the Daily Planet as Clark Kent as fast as you can. It was the first video game to star a published superhero, and one of the first console games with a world spread over many connected screens. You can play it here in your browser.
Secret Quest is a science-fiction action adventure released by Atari in 1989, near the end of the Atari 2600’s life. It was developed by Axlon, a company set up by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, and programmed by Steve DeFrisco. In a space suit, you explore eight alien space stations room by room, fight monsters, collect the codes for each station’s self-destruct system and escape before it blows. It is one of the most ambitious adventures on the console, and a code system lets you continue later. You can play it here in your browser.
Quest for Quintana Roo is a treasure-hunting adventure for the Atari 2600, developed by VSS and published by Sunrise Software in the early 1980s. You play Yucatan Sam, an explorer searching an ancient temple in Mexico’s Quintana Roo for the map rocks that open its sealed vault. It asks for more thinking than most 2600 action games: you have to juggle tools, watch your air and remember where things are. You can play it here in your browser.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is Atari’s 1982 adventure game based on the first Indiana Jones film. It was designed and programmed by Howard Scott Warshaw and released in November 1982. Rather than replaying scenes from the film, it is a puzzle adventure: Indy explores Cairo, a temple, a black market and the desert mesas, trading and fighting his way to the Ark of the Covenant. You can play it here in your browser.