Genre: Simulation

Simulation games try to recreate something from the real world, or a believable fictional one: flying a jet, commanding a submarine, driving a tank or steering a space shuttle. On the Atari 2600 that was a bold goal. With 128 bytes of RAM, no way to scale graphics and a single-button joystick, designers had to decide which few details made an experience feel real, and leave out the rest.
They found creative answers. Activision’s Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space (1983) used every switch on the console as part of the cockpit and came with an overlay to label them, taking you from launch and docking to re-entry and landing. Atari’s Stellar Track (1980), sold only through Sears, is a text-based space command game inspired by the mainframe game Star Trek. Battlezone (1983) replaced the arcade’s wireframe graphics with ordinary sprites but kept the radar and the tense tank hunt.
Some games relied on special hardware. Mogul Maniac (Amiga, 1983) was made for the Joyboard, a board you stand on and lean to steer your skier. Later, Tomcat: The F-14 Fighter Simulator (Absolute Entertainment, 1988) brought jet combat to the console in its final years. Rob Fulop’s Actionauts, a 1984 prototype, has you program a robot with a list of commands and then watch it run through a maze; a small batch of cartridges was finally produced decades later.
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