Genre: Puzzle

Puzzle games ask you to think rather than react: arrange pieces, match a pattern or find the right sequence of moves. They are rare on the Atari 2600. The console was built for fast action games with a joystick and one button, and its 128 bytes of RAM leave little room to track the state of a complex puzzle. The games that exist tend to use a small board and bold, blocky graphics.
The Rubik’s Cube craze of the early 1980s reached the 2600 too. Atari released Atari Video Cube, and a second cube game, 3-D Rubik’s Cube, was programmed by Peter C. Niday in 1982. It shows the cube in perspective with three faces visible at once, and can even demonstrate a solution. Atari first planned to put both games on one cartridge, but chose to release only Video Cube, and the 3-D prototype did not surface until 2002.
Two of the puzzle games here come from modern hobbyists. Andrew Davie’s Qb (2001) is a port of his own 1984 Atari 800 game: you hop across a board of blocks and slide them until they match a small target pattern, while monsters try to mess them up. Pressure Gauge is a 1999 homebrew by John K. Harvey that tests your timing: press the button when a rising line meets its marker. From the 1980s there are also small releases such as I.Q. 180, sold under the Home Vision label.
Take a look at the games below and test your brain right here in your browser.