1978 was a slow second year for the Atari VCS. Atari built 800,000 consoles but sold only 550,000, and Warner had to cover the losses. New cartridges came out in one batch for Christmas, and production moved to Asia, where a lighter version of the console, known to collectors as the “Light Sixer”, replaced the original “Heavy Sixer”.
The games on this page show Atari trying out many kinds of play. Breakout, programmed by Brad Stewart, came to the console in colour, while the arcade original was black and white. Codebreaker and Brain Games were made for the new keyboard controller. Sports fans get Home Run, the first baseball game on any Atari system, and a one-on-one Basketball. Warren Robinett’s first Atari game, Slot Racers, is here, and so is Carol Shaw’s first published game, 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe. Two unreleased prototypes are filed under this year too: Computer Chess and David Crane’s Boggle.
A few dates here are generous. Super Breakout is listed under 1978, the year of the arcade game, but the 2600 cartridge came out in October 1981, and Casino and Human Cannonball are usually dated to 1979.
Scroll down and play any of the 1978 games in your browser.
Hangman is Atari's 1978 version of the classic pen-and-paper word game, programmed by Alan Miller, who later co-founded Activision. Sears sold the same cartridge under the name Spelling. You guess a hidden word one letter at a time,…
Play ▸Human Cannonball is one of the earliest Atari 2600 cartridges, released by Atari in 1979 (Sears sold it as Cannon Man). Your job is simple to explain and tricky to master: set the angle and speed of a…
Play ▸Codebreaker is a 1978 Atari cartridge with two logic games: a number-guessing game in the style of the board game Mastermind, and the ancient strategy game Nim. Released in October 1978 alongside Brain Games and Hunt & Score,…
Play ▸Computer Chess is an unreleased 1978 Atari prototype by Bob Whitehead and Larry Wagner. It is the early version of the program that Atari later shrank and sold as Video Chess. It never reached the shops, but it…
Play ▸3-D Tic-Tac-Toe is Atari's version of four-in-a-row tic-tac-toe played on a 4×4×4 cube, for the Atari 2600. It was programmed by Carol Shaw, and it was her first published game. You can play against the computer on eight…
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