Sports games were among the first cartridges made for the Atari 2600, and they show clearly how programmers worked around the console’s limits. The graphics chip can draw only two player sprites per line, so a full team of eleven or nine was out of the question. Bob Whitehead’s Football for Atari fielded four players a side by repeating graphics and drawing different players on alternate frames, a trick that causes visible flicker. Other early games, such as Larry Kaplan’s Bowling (1979), picked sports that needed only a few moving objects.
Activision, founded by former Atari programmers, pushed the genre on. Bob Whitehead’s Boxing (1980) was one of the company’s first four games. Alan Miller’s Tennis (1981) fits a full scoring system and a ball with a shadow into just 2 KB, and his Ice Hockey (1981) plays two against two. David Crane’s The Activision Decathlon (1983) has ten events, and you run by waggling the joystick left and right as fast as you can.
Atari later launched its own RealSports line, including RealSports Baseball (1982), and the genre kept going into the late 1980s with Epyx conversions such as Summer Games (1987). Two players can share one keyboard in the emulator for most of these games, which is often the best way to play them.
Pick a sport from the list below and play it right here in your browser.
California Games on the Atari 2600 Introduction:Welcome to the heart of action sports, California, where the sun kisses the shores and the streets buzz with the thrill of competition. California Games is your ticket to the ultimate sports adventure, offering a blend of surfing, BMX biking, skateboarding, and more. Choose your sponsors and dive into … Read more
Miniature Golf is one of Atari’s early cartridges for the Video Computer System, programmed by Tom Reuterdahl and released in 1979. It offers nine holes of top-down mini golf with walls to bank shots off and obstacles that move across the course. Sears sold the same game under the name Arcade Golf. The graphics are very basic, but working out angles and distances is a quiet puzzle that still holds up for a few rounds. You can play it here in your browser.
Ski Run is an obscure winter sports cartridge for the Atari 2600 from the early 1980s. The version on this page is the PAL cartridge that Suntek sold in Europe, model SS-024, which emulator databases date to 1983. Who programmed it is not known, and very little has been written about it. You can play it here in your browser.
Football is Atari’s early American football cartridge for the 2600, programmed by Bob Whitehead and sold by Sears as part of its Tele-Games line. It is a two-player game only: one person plays offence, the other defence, and both secretly choose a play before each snap. That makes it a guessing game between two friends as much as an action game. You can play it here in your browser, two people at one keyboard.
RealSports Tennis is a tennis simulation video game for the Atari 2600 that offers both single-player and two-player modes, along with two pre-set difficulty levels, “slow” and “fast.” Before starting the game, players need to name their character, a unique feature for an Atari 2600 game. In single-player mode, the player, wearing a blue shirt, … Read more
Basketball is one of the first basketball video games for a home console: a one-on-one match on a full court seen from the sideline, programmed by Alan Miller and released by Atari for the 2600 in 1978. It is simple, but the shooting and stealing still work well, and it is fun against a friend or the computer. You can play it here in your browser.
Vong is a 2008 Atari 2600 homebrew by Rick Skrbina. It plays like Pong, but the court is turned 90 degrees, so the paddles sit at the top and bottom of the screen and the ball travels up and down. It is a simple, quick paddle game for one player against the computer or two players against each other. You can play it here in your browser.
Winter Games is the Atari 2600 version of Epyx’s 1985 multi-event sports game, which started out on the Commodore 64. The cartridge packs seven snow and ice events, from the slalom to the luge, and lets up to eight players compete for medals under the flags of different countries. It is one of the more ambitious late-era 2600 releases and works well as a party game. You can play it here in your browser.
Track & Field is Atari’s 1984 Atari 2600 version of Konami’s 1983 arcade hit. It was programmed at General Computer Corporation (GCC) by Seth Lipkin, Jacques Hugon and Allen Wells. You compete in six athletics events, from the 100-metre dash to the high jump, and you must reach a qualifying mark in each one to carry on. It is a button-mashing game at heart, with timing that matters as much as speed. You can play it here in your browser.
Trick Shot is a pool and billiards game for the Atari 2600, designed by Dennis Koble and released by Imagic in April 1982. It was one of the new company’s first three cartridges, alongside Demon Attack and Star Voyager. You aim, set the power and add spin on a table seen from above. It is the only pool game on the 2600, and you can play it here in your browser.