Congo Bongo
Congo Bongo is Sega's isometric climbing game: a safari hunter chases a coconut-throwing gorilla up a mountain and across a river full of snapping fish. Sega published this Atari 5200 cartridge in 1983 with two of the arcade…
Play ▸Release date: 1983
1983 is by far the largest year in our archive, with around 270 games. Toy makers, film studios, food companies and small firms that vanished within months all put cartridges on the shelves. It was also the year of the video game crash. Atari lost $536 million, and in September it buried unsold stock in a New Mexico landfill. In October it brought the console to Japan as the Atari 2800, where it made little impact.
Plenty of good games still came out. Activision released Dan Kitchen’s first 2600 game, Crackpots, and Parker Brothers brought Konami’s Tutankham and the lightsaber duel Star Wars: Jedi Arena. Atari continued its Swordquest series with Swordquest: Fireworld, and Starpath’s Sword of Saros showed how far the Supercharger could go. At the other end of the scale is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, better known for its controversy than for its gameplay.
Some titles on this page reached shops in early 1984, such as Private Eye and Track & Field, and Xevious is a prototype that was never released.
There is a lot to explore below, and every game plays right in your browser.
Battlezone
Battlezone is Atari's 1980 arcade tank game, seen from inside the tank and drawn in vector lines. This Atari 5200 conversion was scheduled for November 1983 but never came out; the only known prototype is dated September 1983…
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Barroom Baseball
Barroom Baseball is an unreleased 1983 variant of Atari's RealSports Baseball for the Atari 5200, prepared by Atari's coin-op division for a coin-operated 5200 unit meant to sit on a bar counter. The project was dropped before it…
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Jungle Hunt
Jungle Hunt is Atari's 1983 Atari 5200 version of Taito's 1982 arcade game. You swing across ropes, swim a river full of crocodiles, dodge rolling boulders and leap over cannibals to rescue a kidnapped friend before she ends…
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Moon Patrol
Moon Patrol is Atari's 1983 Atari 5200 conversion of Irem's 1982 arcade game, programmed by Scott Smith. You drive a police buggy across the moon, jumping craters and rocks and shooting UFOs, on a 26-section beat that keeps…
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Astro Grover
Astro Grover is a counting game for young children from the Children's Computer Workshop, starring Sesame Street's Grover as an astronaut. Atari finished this Atari 5200 version in 1983 but never released it; CBS later published it for…
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