By 1981 the Atari VCS was selling in the millions: Atari sold an estimated 3.1 million consoles that year. Cartridges grew too. In August Asteroids became the first 2600 game to use bank switching, a trick that let a cartridge hold 8 KB instead of 4 KB. Missile Command, Rob Fulop’s version of Atari’s own arcade game, came out in April, and Carla Meninsky’s four-player castle battle Warlords followed the same year.
Activision was now in full swing, and much of this page comes from its early catalogue: Kaboom!, Freeway, Tennis, Ice Hockey, Laser Blast and Stampede. Smaller publishers were arriving as well. Games by Apollo from Texas started with Skeet Shoot, and CommaVid’s Video Life brought John Conway’s Game of Life to the console. You will also find Activision’s Venetian Blinds Demo, a test program that was never sold.
Some dates here are approximate: Activision’s Bridge came out in December 1980, while Apollo’s Spacechase and Racquetball are usually dated to 1982.
Pick a game from the list below and play it in your browser.
Missile Command is Atari’s 1981 Atari 2600 version of its own 1980 arcade game. Rob Fulop programmed it, and it became a commercial success. You defend six cities from waves of falling missiles by placing explosions in their path, and the waves keep getting faster until your last city falls. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to download or install.
Laser Blast is a 1981 Activision shooter designed by David Crane, one of the company’s founders. You fly a saucer over a planet’s surface and trade laser fire with three enemy ground bases at a time. It is a short-burst reflex game: the controls take seconds to learn, but the enemy aims faster and faster as you go. You can play it here in your browser.
Kaboom! is a 1981 paddle game from Activision, designed by Larry Kaplan with graphics by David Crane. A grinning villain called the Mad Bomber moves back and forth across the top of the screen dropping bombs, and you catch them in a stack of water buckets before they hit the ground. It takes seconds to learn and gets fast enough to leave your hands shaking. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.
Ice Hockey is a 1981 sports game for the Atari 2600, designed by Activision co-founder Alan Miller. Each team has just two players, a goalie and a forward, and a match lasts one fast three-minute period. It is easy to pick up, and it gets really competitive once you learn to aim your shots and bounce passes off the boards. You can play it here in your browser, against the computer or a friend.
Freeway is a 1981 Activision game designed and programmed by David Crane. You guide a chicken across ten lanes of speeding traffic, and every safe crossing scores a point. It is simple, but judging gaps in eight traffic patterns keeps it tense, and two players can race each other. You can play it here in your browser.
Asteroids is Atari’s 1981 home version of its own 1979 arcade hit. You steer a small ship through a field of drifting space rocks and blast them into smaller and smaller pieces before they hit you. The Atari 2600 cartridge was programmed by Brad Stewart and Bob Smith, and it swaps the arcade’s glowing vector lines for solid, colourful rocks. It is easy to pick up, and once the screen fills with small, fast fragments it gets tense quickly. You can play it here in your browser, with nothing to install.