Genre: Adventure

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.