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.
Choose a machine from the list below and take the controls right here in your browser.
Slot Machine is a 1979 Atari 2600 cartridge that turns the console into a three-reel casino slot machine. It was programmed by David Crane, who later co-founded Activision, and Sears sold it under the name Slots. There is no real money involved, of course: you and a friend, or you and the computer, try to keep your coins longer than the other side. You can play it here in your browser.
Sea Battle is a two-player naval war game for the Atari 2600, programmed by Larry Zwick and Bruce Pedersen for Mattel’s M Network label. It is a cut-down conversion of Mattel’s 1980 Intellivision game of the same name. The 2600 version was finished around 1983 but never released at the time, and its working title was High Seas. Cartridges only appeared in 2000, in a small run from Intellivision Productions. You can play it here in your browser.
Mogul Maniac is a 1983 slalom skiing game for the Atari 2600, published by the Amiga Corporation. It was sold together with the Joyboard, a board you stood on and leaned to steer, and it was the only game ever released for that controller. You race down nine courses through red and blue gates, and the score is simply your time. The Joyboard was wired just like a joystick, so you can play it here in your browser with the keyboard.
Tomcat: The F-14 Fighter Simulator is a late Atari 2600 flight game designed by Dan Kitchen and published by Absolute Entertainment. You launch an F-14 from an aircraft carrier, fight enemy jets with guns and missiles, and then try to land back on the deck. You can play it here in your browser.
Battlezone is the Atari 2600 version of Atari’s 1980 arcade tank game, released by Atari in August 1983. You roll across a battlefield hunting enemy tanks, supertanks, fighters and flying saucers, using a radar screen to find targets that are behind you or out of sight. The arcade’s wireframe 3D graphics were beyond the 2600, but the tense hunt-and-dodge gameplay survived the move. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Blackjack is one of the first Atari 2600 cartridges. Bob Whitehead designed it for Atari, and it was one of the games on sale when the console launched in September 1977. You play against a computer dealer, using the paddle controller to bet and to play each hand. It looks plain, but two rule sets and two shuffle options give it more depth than you might expect. You can play it here in your browser.
Actionauts is an unreleased Atari 2600 puzzle game by Rob Fulop, the programmer of Demon Attack and the 2600 Missile Command. Instead of steering a hero directly, you write a short program for a little robot and then watch it try to find its way through a maze to a piece of cheese. Fulop stopped work in 1984, so this is a prototype, but it is fully playable. You can play it here in your browser.