Genre: Sports

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.