AtariAge is a website for Atari players and collectors, with forums and a large database of games, manuals and rarity ratings. It also runs an online store that sells new cartridges, so almost everything under this name is a modern homebrew, written decades after the console’s heyday and usually sold with a manual and printed label art. Some of these games were released by their own authors or small labels and only sold through the store, such as Warring Worms from Billy Eno’s Baroque Gaming.
The site has 18 pages here, several of them NTSC and PAL versions of the same game. A few to try:
Halo 2600 (2010): Ed Fries’s take on Halo as a 1982-style game, fitted into 4 kilobytes.
Medieval Mayhem (2006): Darrell Spice Jr.’s four-player castle game based on Warlords.
Boulder Dash: Andrew Davie and Thomas Jentzsch’s conversion of the digging puzzle, made with First Star’s approval.
Lady Bug (2006): John W. Champeau’s version of the arcade maze game, with gates you swing to reshape the maze.
K.O. Cruiser (2010): Devin D. Cook’s first-person boxing game against six cartoon opponents.
Duck Attack!: Will Nicholes’s tribute to Adventure, full of fire-breathing mutant ducks.
No cartridge needed: pick one below and play it in your browser.
Lady Bug is a 2006 homebrew conversion of Universal’s 1981 arcade maze game, written from scratch for the Atari 2600 by John W. Champeau of Champ Games and sold through the AtariAge Store. You guide a ladybird through a garden maze, eating flowers while other insects hunt you. What sets it apart from Pac-Man-style games is the swinging gates that let you reshape the maze as you play. This is the NTSC version. You can play it here in your browser.
Lady Bug is a 2006 homebrew version of Universal’s 1981 arcade maze game, written for the Atari 2600 by John W. Champeau of Champ Games. You steer a ladybird around a garden maze, eating flowers, hearts and letters while other insects chase you, and you can swing the maze’s gates to shut them out. This page runs the PAL60 build of the cartridge. You can play it here in your browser.
Halo 2600 reimagines Microsoft’s Halo as if it had been made for the Atari 2600 in 1982. It is a new homebrew game, released in 2010 by AtariAge, and it was written by Ed Fries, the former head of Microsoft Game Studios who helped Microsoft acquire Halo developer Bungie. The whole game fits in just 4 kilobytes. You can play it here in your browser.
Hunchy II is a homebrew platform game for the Atari 2600, programmed by Chris Walton and released on cartridge in 2005 through the AtariAge store. You guide Quasimodo through the rooms of Notre Dame cathedral to rescue Esmeralda. It takes its idea from the 1982 arcade game Hunchback, which was loosely based on Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. You can play it here in your browser.
Fall Down is a homebrew Atari 2600 game by Aaron Curtis, released on cartridge in 2005 and sold through AtariAge. Red and blue characters race downwards through a stack of rising platforms, and the first to drop past each platform claims it. It is a fast, simple idea that works best as a head-to-head duel, but it also has a capable computer opponent. You can play it here in your browser.
Duck Attack! is a homebrew Atari 2600 game by Will Nicholes, written in 2009 and released on cartridge through AtariAge at the 2010 Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. It is his tribute to Warren Robinett’s Adventure: instead of a knight fleeing dragons, you steer a small robot through a maze of rooms full of giant, fire-breathing mutant ducks, collecting radioactive eggs. You can play it here in your browser.
This Boulder Dash is a homebrew Atari 2600 conversion of First Star Software’s 1984 computer game, made by Andrew Davie and Thomas Jentzsch and sold by AtariAge. It is not an original 1980s cartridge: the two programmers spent almost ten years on it, with First Star’s approval, and it was released as a limited run of 250 cartridges. The result is a surprisingly faithful version of a classic digging puzzle on a console that was never meant to handle it. You can play it here in your browser.
The 2005 Minigame Multicart is a homebrew Atari 2600 cartridge that collects seven small games from the 2005 Minigame Competition, where programmers had to fit each entry into just 1K of code, a quarter of a standard 4K cartridge. The games were written by Zach Matley, Bob Montgomery, Fred Quimby and Chris Walton, and the cartridge was self-published in 2005. An on-screen menu lets you pick a game and read its instructions. You can play the whole collection here in your browser.