Atari made the Atari 2600, which first went on sale in September 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System, and it also published many of the console’s games. Nine cartridges were available at launch, among them Street Racer, Surround and Video Olympics. Over the next years Atari’s programmers wrote original games and converted arcade hits, both Atari’s own, such as Missile Command, and licensed ones from companies like Taito, Namco and Williams. Sears sold many of the same games under its Tele-Games label, often with different names. The Atari name here also covers the later Atari Corporation, which kept releasing 2600 cartridges until 1990, among them Solaris, Radar Lock and Xenophobe.
This archive includes Atari’s released games as well as prototypes that never reached the shops. Some places to start:
Video Olympics (1977): 50 Pong-style games and variations for paddle controllers.
Video Chess (1979): a full chess opponent squeezed into a machine with 128 bytes of memory.
Warlords (1981): Carla Meninsky’s castle-smashing game for up to four players.
Missile Command (1981): Rob Fulop’s version of the arcade game about defending six cities.
Star Raiders (1982): first-person space combat with a galaxy map.
Solaris (1986): Doug Neubauer’s space combat and exploration game.
The full list is below, and every game on it runs in your browser.
Crossbow Overview “Crossbow” is an innovative light gun shooter game, initially launched in arcades by Exidy in 1983 and subsequently brought to the Atari 2600 by Atari Corporation. This game stands out for its unique control mechanism, which involves a positional gun designed to mimic the look and feel of a full-sized crossbow, offering players … Read more
Canyon Bomber is Atari’s 1979 Atari 2600 version of its 1977 arcade game, programmed by David Crane. Planes fly across a canyon full of coloured bricks, and all you decide is when to drop a bomb. It is a one-button game, but getting the timing right is harder than it looks. The cartridge also includes Sea Bomber, where you sink ships with depth charges. You can play both here in your browser.
Brain Games is a 1978 Atari cartridge of memory and puzzle games, programmed by Larry Kaplan. It packs 19 game variations into six activities: repeating sequences of tones or numbers, remembering pictures, spotting the odd one out, adding up digits, and even playing tunes. Sears also sold it under its own label. You can load it here in your browser, but please read the controller note below first.
Atari Video Cube is a puzzle game for the Atari 2600 based on the cube puzzle that was a craze in the early 1980s. Doug Macrae, one of the founders of General Computer Corporation, programmed it for Atari. At first it was sold only by mail through the Atari Club. Instead of twisting layers, you walk a little character called Hubie the Cube Master across the cube and swap coloured squares one at a time. You can play it here in your browser.
Alpha Beam with Ernie is a 1983 Sesame Street learning game for children aged 3 to 7, made by Atari together with the Children’s Computer Workshop. Michael Callahan programmed it and Preston Stuart did the graphics. Ernie is flying home from Saturn when his rocket runs out of fuel, and the only way to refill it is to match letters of the alphabet. You can load it here in your browser, but please read the note on controls first.
Taz is a 1983 Atari 2600 game starring the Tasmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes cartoons. It was programmed by Steve Woita and published by Atari. Taz spins across the screen as a small tornado and tries to eat everything in sight, except the sticks of dynamite hidden among the food. It is simple to learn and gets fast very quickly. You can play it here in your browser.
Asterix is a 1983 Atari 2600 game starring the Gaulish hero of the French comic series. It is Steve Woita’s Taz with new graphics: Atari swapped the Tasmanian Devil for Asterix and Obelix and sold the game mainly in Europe, where the comics were far better known. It is a quick, simple collecting game that gets hard fast. You can play it here in your browser.
Casino is an early Atari 2600 card game cartridge programmed by Bob Whitehead and released by Atari in 1979. Sears sold it under the name Poker Plus. It puts three card games on one cartridge: blackjack, five-card stud poker and poker solitaire, for up to four players using paddle controllers. You can play it here in your browser.
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.
Flag Capture is a 1978 Atari 2600 guessing game designed by Jim Huether and published by Atari (Sears sold it as Capture). A flag is hidden under one square of a grid, and you move an explorer around to find it, using clues that point you in the right direction. It looks very plain, but it is a neat little deduction game, especially for two players. You can play it here in your browser.