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.

Rubik’s Cube 3D

Rubik’s Cube 3D (also known as 3-D Rubik’s Cube) is an unreleased Atari 2600 prototype programmed by Peter C. Niday at Atari in 1982. It is a completely different game from the Rubik’s Cube cartridge that Atari did sell. Instead of walking a character over one flat face, you look at the cube at an angle, with three faces visible at once, and turn its rows and columns like the real puzzle. Nobody knew the game existed until a prototype turned up in 2002. You can play it here in your browser.

Pressure Gauge

Pressure Gauge is a homebrew Atari 2600 game written by John K. Harvey as a college exercise. It is a pure timing test with a single control: press the button at exactly the right moment. The idea came from a mini-game in the PlayStation title Brave Fencer Musashi. The graphics are just a few coloured bars, but it is the kind of game where you keep pressing Reset for one more try. You can play it here in your browser.

Qb

Qb is a homebrew puzzle-action game for the Atari 2600 by Andrew Davie, released by XYPE in 2001. A small hopping character rearranges blocks on the playing field to copy a pattern, while fruit, eggs and monsters get in the way. Davie first wrote the game for the Atari 800 computer in 1984 and brought it to the 2600 many years later. You can play it here in your browser.

I.Q. 180

I.Q. 180 is a memory game for the Atari 2600 from 1983. It was sold in Europe by Home Vision, and the same game also appeared as I.Q. Memory Teaser. Instead of shooting or jumping, you study a grid of letters and symbols and try to remember where each one sits. You can play it here in your browser.

I.Q. Memory Teaser

I.Q. Memory Teaser is a puzzle cartridge for the Atari 2600 released in 1983 by Suntek in PAL format. It is the same game that was also sold as I.Q. 180, including by Home Vision in Europe. As the name suggests, it is meant to test your memory. You can play it here in your browser.

Boggle

Boggle is an unreleased Atari 2600 version of the Parker Brothers word game, programmed by David Crane at Atari in 1978. It never went on sale: the version that survives is a working demo from 1978, almost finished but still a little buggy. It is an interesting look at an early word game on a console with very little memory, and at the work of a programmer who later became famous for Pitfall!. You can play the prototype here in your browser.