Genre: Arcade

This category gathers arcade-style games: short rounds, a score to beat and rising difficulty, the kind of play people knew from coin-operated machines. Arcade games mattered a great deal to the Atari 2600. Atari’s 1980 cartridge of Space Invaders was the first officially licensed arcade conversion for a home console, and after it, publishers competed for arcade licences to squeeze onto 2600 cartridges.
That squeeze was hard. An arcade board of the early 1980s had far more memory and graphics power than the 2600, with its 128 bytes of RAM and cartridges that started out at 2 or 4 KB. Home versions usually meant fewer enemies, simpler screens and some flicker.
This list is unusual because it holds many games that never reached the shops, often cancelled as the video game market collapsed in 1983 and 1984. Surviving prototypes worth a look include:

Elevator Action: Dan Hitchens’ 1983 version of Taito’s spy game, left about three-quarters finished.
Garfield: Steve Woita’s 1984 platform game with the comic strip cat, cancelled after Atari was sold.
Bugs Bunny: Bob Polaro’s 1983 carrot-stealing game, tested and then shelved.
Stunt Cycle: a 1980 home version of Atari’s motorcycle-jumping coin-op, played with paddles.
Wizard: Chris Crawford’s 1980 game, dropped because it was built for a 2 KB cartridge just as Atari moved to 4 KB.
Thwocker: an unfinished 1984 Activision game about a bouncing conductor collecting musical notes.

Scroll down to find these and more, and play them right here in your browser.