In 1979 the Atari VCS was still finding its feet. Sales rose to about 600,000 consoles, taking the total past 1.3 million. Nolan Bushnell, who had urged Warner to start work on a successor, left Atari that year, and on 1 October four Atari programmers founded Activision, the first company to make games for another company’s console.
Atari’s own 1979 releases on this page are mostly board, card and sports games. Video Chess, by Larry Wagner and Bob Whitehead, arrived in November and fitted a working chess opponent into a machine with 128 bytes of RAM. Backgammon, Bowling, Miniature Golf, the parachute game Sky Diver and David Crane’s Slot Machine complete the picture. BASIC Programming is filed here as well, although it is usually dated to 1980.
Choose a game below and play it in your browser.
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.
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.
Video Chess is Atari’s chess cartridge for the 2600, released in November 1979. It was programmed by Larry Wagner and Bob Whitehead, with help from chess expert Julio Kaplan. You play against the computer on a full board, with castling and en passant, and choose from eight levels. Squeezing a working chess opponent into a machine with 128 bytes of memory was a real technical feat. You can play it here in your browser.
Sky Diver is a two-player parachuting game that Atari released for the 2600 in 1979, based on its 1978 arcade game of the same name. Jim Huether programmed the home version, and Sears sold it in its own stores as Dare Diver. Each player jumps from a passing plane and tries to land on a small pad, and the longer you dare to wait before opening your parachute, the more points you get. You can play it here in your browser.
Slot Machine is a 1979 Atari 2600 cartridge that turns the console into a three-reel casino slot machine. It was programmed by David Crane, who later co-founded Activision, and Sears sold it under the name Slots. There is no real money involved, of course: you and a friend, or you and the computer, try to keep your coins longer than the other side. You can play it here in your browser.
Bowling is one of the early Atari VCS (later Atari 2600) cartridges, released by Atari in January 1979 and also sold by Sears under the same name. It was designed and programmed by Larry Kaplan. It is a simple ten-frame game of tenpin bowling, and what makes it worth a try is the control over the ball: in most variations you can still bend its path after it leaves the bowler’s hand. One or two players can take part, and you can play it here in your browser.
BASIC Programming is not a game but a small programming language on a cartridge. Warren Robinett wrote it for Atari at the same time as he was finishing Adventure, and Atari released it for the 2600 in 1980. It is one of the very few non-game cartridges for the console and a fascinating example of how much people tried to squeeze out of a machine with only 128 bytes of RAM. You can load it here in your browser, but read the note below first.
Backgammon is Atari’s 1979 version of the old board game for the Atari 2600, programmed by Craig Nelson. You can play against the computer or a friend, with a working doubling cube and a second game, Acey Deucey, built in. It was one of the earliest electronic versions of backgammon, and Sears also sold it under the same name. You can play it here in your browser.