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.
Depth Charge is an unreleased 1983 Atari 2600 submarine game, programmed by Jerry Lawson’s company Videosoft for Amiga, the firm that later built the Amiga computer. You look through a periscope at ships sailing across the horizon and try to sink as many as you can before your torpedoes run out. It plays a lot like the arcade game Sea Wolf. The game was never sold at the time, and you can play the surviving version here in your browser.
Dragon Defender is a horizontal shoot ’em up for the Atari 2600 from the unlicensed Taiwanese cartridge scene of the early 1980s. It was sold in Europe and Australia by several labels, including Ariola, Suntek and Rainbow Vision, and the version on this page is the European PAL release. You fly a dragon and shoot down waves of enemies coming from the right. It is a simple, obscure game, and an interesting look at the budget cartridges of the time. You can play it here in your browser.
Combat Two is the unreleased sequel to Combat, the tank duel that came packed with the Atari 2600 for years. According to AtariProtos, it was programmed in 1982 by Alan Hodgkinson and Tom Calderwood at General Computer Corporation (GCC) for Atari, but it never reached the shops. It is a slower, more tactical tank battle for two players. You can play the prototype here in your browser.
Aquaventure is an unreleased Atari 2600 prototype from 1983, programmed by Gary Shannon, with Tod Frye writing the display kernel. It never appeared in any Atari catalogue or press material, and nobody knew it existed until a copy surfaced at a collectors’ gathering in the late 1990s. Its finder said he had bought it at a flea market in Florida. You can play this lost undersea game here in your browser.
Astrowar is a horizontal space shooter for the Atari 2600, and this page has the European PAL cartridge sold by Goliath in Germany in 1983 as cartridge number 2. You steer a small space shuttle while falling stars, spinning bombs, unknown spaceships and space monsters fly at you from the right. The more you score, the faster things get. An NTSC version is on this site as Astrowar (USA). You can play it here in your browser.
Astrowar is a space shooter for the Atari 2600: you steer a small shuttle and blast falling stars, spinning bombs, unknown spaceships and space monsters before they get past you. This page has the NTSC version. The European PAL release has its own page, Astrowar (Europe). You can play it here in your browser.