A shoot ’em up is a game where your ship, sub or soldier faces wave after wave of enemies and the fire button rarely rests. On the Atari 2600 the genre had to cope with tight limits: the graphics chip can draw only two player sprites and two missiles on a line, so more enemies than that means flicker or careful spacing. Designers also had to fit scrolling backgrounds, bullets and a score into 128 bytes of RAM.
This list is unusual because many of its best-known games were never sold. As the video game market collapsed in 1983 and 1984, Atari cancelled or shelved many nearly finished cartridges, and the prototypes that survived have since been shared by collectors. Several of them are here:
Xevious: Tod Frye’s nearly complete 1984 version of Namco’s scrolling shooter; only the Atari 7800 version reached the shops.
Sinistar: an almost finished 1984 take on the Williams arcade game.
Tempest: a roughly half-finished prototype from January 1984 of Atari’s tube-shooting arcade game.
Saboteur: Howard Scott Warshaw’s 1983 robot shooter, shelved when Atari wanted to turn it into an A-Team game.
Aquaventure: a 1983 undersea treasure hunt with a spear gun, completed but never released.
Combat Two: a 1982 sequel to Combat with mazes, armour and bases, made at General Computer Corporation.
Scroll down, pick a ship and start shooting right here in your browser.
World End is a 1983 shoot ’em up sold in Europe on the Home Vision label, whose cartridges were made by Gem International. A huge alien mothership hangs at the top of the screen, smaller craft break away from it, and you defend the ground from a laser cannon at the bottom. Like many European cartridges of the time, it was sold under a whole list of other names. You can play it here in your browser.
Xevious for the Atari 2600 is an unreleased prototype of Namco’s 1983 arcade shooter. Tod Frye programmed it at Atari in 1983 and early 1984, and the last known version is close to finished, but the cartridge never went on sale. It is a rare chance to see how Atari tried to squeeze a scrolling air-and-ground shooter onto the 2600. You can play it here in your browser.
Wall Break is the Home Vision release of Wall-Defender, a single-player shooter for the Atari 2600 first published in 1983 by Bomb, the label of the Asian developer Onbase Co. Home Vision was a Belgian brand, used by the company VDI to sell Atari 2600 games made by the Taiwanese firm Gem International Corporation. Its Wall Break cartridge is usually dated to 1984. The page runs the European (PAL) cartridge. You can play it here in your browser.
Space Tunnel – Le Tunnel de L’Estace is a bilingual English and French release of Space Tunnel, the 1982 shooter by the Taiwanese company Bit Corporation. It came out under Bit Corporation’s Puzzy brand with the same model number, PG202, and AtariMania lists it as a Canadian release. The game is the same: you dodge UFOs and their bouncing missiles in a tunnel with jagged walls. You can play it here in your browser; the full rules and scoring are on the Space Tunnel page.
Treasure Island is a little-known PAL cartridge for the Atari 2600, sold under the Suntek label with the model number SS-026. It is not an original title: it is the same game that the company Home Vision released in Europe as Treasure Discovery, and that the German mail-order company Quelle sold as Kampf um die Schatzinsel (“Battle for Treasure Island”). You can play it here in your browser.
Tempest for the Atari 2600 is an unfinished prototype of Atari’s 1981 arcade game by Dave Theurer. The arcade original used a colour vector screen and a spinning dial to move a claw-shaped ship around the rim of 3D tubes. This 1984 home version was never completed or released, but a prototype cartridge dated 5 January 1984 has survived. You can play it here in your browser.
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi – Ewok Adventure is an unreleased Atari 2600 game, programmed by Larry Gelberg for Parker Brothers in 1983. An Ewok on a hang glider flies over the forest moon of Endor to destroy the Empire’s shield generator bunker. The game was finished, but Parker Brothers cancelled it over an argument about its controls, and it only reached players years later as a prototype. You can play it here in your browser.
Shooting Arcade is an unreleased Atari 2600 target-shooting game made for Atari’s light gun. It was developed in Mexico by Agustin Ortiz of the company Heuristica, with final changes by Tod Frye, and the last builds date from 1989 and early 1990. Atari never released it. It is one of only two 2600 games ever made for the light gun, and you can load the prototype here in your browser, with one big limitation explained below.
Sinistar is an Atari 2600 version of the 1983 Williams arcade game, programmed for Atari by Lew Harp in 1984. It is a prototype that was never released. Atari squeezed the arcade game into an 8K cartridge, and the last known version was close to finished, but the game was shelved during the video game crash. You can play it here in your browser.
Sky Alien is a European PAL release of a fixed-screen space shooter that the company Bomb published as Assault. Sky Alien came out on the Home Vision label, a Belgian brand that the company VDI used to sell Atari 2600 games made by the Taiwanese firm Gem International Corporation. The game was sold under a long list of other names too, including Space Raider, Laser Loop, Fire Birds and Invasion der UFO’s. It is sometimes described as a Space Invaders clone, but it plays more like Demon Attack. You can play it here in your browser.