Genre: Strategy

Strategy games reward planning over reflexes: thinking a few moves ahead, managing resources or outguessing an opponent. On the Atari 2600 this category covers board games against the computer, tactical space battles and thinking games that sit somewhere between puzzle and action.
Writing a computer opponent for a machine with 128 bytes of RAM was a real challenge. Video Chess (1979), by Larry Wagner and Bob Whitehead, plays a full game with castling and en passant, and draws the board by showing four pieces on one set of lines and four on the next, because the console cannot normally put eight objects side by side. Carol Shaw’s 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (1978) stacks four boards to make a cube, and Atari also released Backgammon (1979) and Othello (1980). Activision added its own Checkers by Alan Miller.
Other games mix planning with action. In Star Raiders (1982) you study a galaxy map and watch your energy while hunting an enemy fleet, using the Video Touch Pad keypad that came with the game. Entombed (US Games, 1983) builds its maze as you go, and its maze-making routine was later studied by researchers in a 2018 paper.
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