Publisher: US Games

U.S. Games was an American company that started out making handheld electronic sports games. In 1982 the cereal maker Quaker Oats bought it to make Atari 2600 cartridges and to compete with Parker Brothers, which was owned by its rival General Mills. Most of its games were made by outside studios, especially James Wickstead Design Associates and Western Technologies, and Quaker hoped to build a line of family-friendly cartridges. The first release, Space Jockey, came out under the Vidtec label in January 1982.
None of the 14 cartridges became a hit, and Quaker closed the division in 1983, during the video game crash. Several games lived on in Europe through Carrere Video. The site has all fourteen. Some to try first:

Gopher (1983): Sylvia Day’s farmyard game, with a farmer guarding his carrots.
Name This Game: a diver guards treasure from an octopus and a shark. The title was a placeholder for a naming contest that was never completed.
Space Jockey (1982): Garry Kitchen’s first video game, a side-scrolling shooter.
Entombed (1983): an endless scrolling maze whose maze routine puzzled researchers decades later.
Eggomania (1983): catch falling eggs with a paddle, then throw them back.
Word Zapper (1982): a spelling game that plays like a shooter.

Choose one below and play it in your browser.

M.A.D.

M.A.D., short for "Missile Attack and Defense", is a missile-defence shooter for the Atari 2600 published by U.S. Games, the video game arm of the Quaker Oats Company. The cartridge carries a 1982 copyright. Waves of missiles gather…

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Gopher

Gopher is a farmyard action game for the Atari 2600, developed by James Wickstead Design Associates and published by U.S. Games in January 1983. Sylvia Day designed and programmed it. You play a farmer with a shovel, defending…

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Eggomania

Eggomania is a paddle game from U.S. Games, developed by James Wickstead Design Associates and released in North America in January 1983. A bird struts along the top of the screen dropping eggs, and your blue bear has…

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Entombed

Entombed is a 1983 maze game for the Atari 2600, developed by Western Technologies and published by U.S. Games. Tom Sloper designed it and Steve Sidley programmed it. You are an archaeologist trapped in catacombs full of zombies,…

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