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.
S.A.C. Alert is an unreleased 1983 air combat game for the Atari 2600, made for Amiga Corporation, the company that later built the Amiga computer. The letters stand for Strategic Air Command. You fly a warplane over land or sea, shooting enemy planes and ground or naval targets while watching your fuel and altitude. It is the most complete of the Amiga prototypes that have been found, and you can play it here in your browser.
Saboteur is an unreleased Atari 2600 game from 1983, programmed by Howard Scott Warshaw, the designer of Yars’ Revenge and E.T., with graphics by Jerome Domurat. You play Hotot, a robot sent into an alien missile base to stop a warhead from being built and launched. It never reached the shops, but the prototype survived and is well regarded by collectors. You can play it here in your browser.
Raumpatrouille (“Space Patrol”) is a space shoot-’em-up that the German mail-order company Quelle sold for the Atari 2600 around 1983. Like many cartridges in Quelle’s range, it was not a new game but one from another company with a German title. Here it is the same program that appeared elsewhere as UFO Patrol from Suntek and as X’Mission. Very little has been written about it, so it is mostly of interest to collectors of European releases. You can play it here in your browser.
Pleiades is an unreleased 1983 Atari 2600 prototype: a home version of Tehkan’s 1981 arcade shooter, programmed by the British developer UA Limited. It never reached the shops, but it looks close to finished, and the prototype archive AtariProtos calls it a port that does the arcade game justice. You can play it here in your browser.
Phantom UFO is a cartridge from Bit Corporation, a Taiwanese company that made Atari 2600 games and console clones in the 1980s. It is listed as a version of Spider Fighter, the 1983 Activision shooter designed by Larry Miller, sold under a different name. Its exact release date is not documented. You can play it here in your browser.
Sea Monster – O Monstro Marinho is the Brazilian release of Sea Monster, a simple shooting game made by the Taiwanese company Bit Corporation. It was sold in Brazil by CCE, a company that put out many 2600 games there under Portuguese titles. It is not a prototype: it is a finished cartridge with a translated name. You command a ship on the surface and drop depth charges on the creatures below. You can play it here in your browser.
Immies & Aggies is a 1983 shooting game that the small American company Zimag planned to sell for the Atari 2600 but never released. The name comes from marbles: “aggies” are agate marbles, and “immies” are glass marbles made to look like agates. On screen, though, the marbles are simple coloured squares. What survives is a prototype, and it plays more like a rough experiment than a finished product. It is still an interesting look at what a small 1983 publisher had in the works. You can play it here in your browser.
Ixion is an Atari 2600 game that Sega developed but never released. It was meant to be the home version of Sega’s Ixion arcade game from 1983, which was itself never put on sale. You drive a small tank-like ship around a grid of tiles, collecting five white squares that spell out the word IXION, while knocking a bouncing sphere around to rebuild the floor beneath you. Only a prototype survives, and you can play it here in your browser.
Kamikaze Saucers is an unreleased 1983 Atari 2600 shooter from Syncro, programmed by Dan Wolf. It is a fixed-screen shooter in the style of Demon Attack and Atlantis: saucers fly across the sky and you have to shoot them down before they turn on you. The game was never sold, but the prototype survived, and you can play it here in your browser.
Funky Fish is an unreleased Atari 2600 prototype by UA Limited, a company that made games for the Emerson Arcadia 2001 console. It is a port of an obscure 1981 arcade game by Sun Electronics: a side-scrolling underwater shooter in which you play a small fish fighting sea monsters. The 2600 version never reached the shops, but the prototype survived, and you can play it here in your browser.