Survival Run
Survival Run is a first-person space shooter published by Milton Bradley for the Atari 2600 in 1983. You fly a starfighter through a maze of tunnels deep inside an alien planet, shooting guards and force fields while you…
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.
Sweat! – The Decathlon Game
Sweat! The Decathlon Game is an unreleased Starpath game from 1983, programmed by Scott Nelson. It was meant to be Starpath's answer to Activision's Decathlon, loaded from cassette tape into the Starpath Supercharger, an add-on that gave the…
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Sword of Saros (cassette)
Sword of Saros is a 1983 dungeon adventure for the Starpath Supercharger, the add-on that let the Atari 2600 load bigger games from audio cassettes. Programmed by Jon Leupp and Stephen Landrum, it sends you through an evil…
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Swordfight
Swordfight is a two-player duelling game for the Atari 2600, designed and programmed by Stephen Tatsumi at Mattel Electronics in 1983. Mattel finished it for its M Network label but never released it. The game finally came out…
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Swordquest: Fireworld
Swordquest: Fireworld is the second of Atari's three Swordquest adventure games for the 2600, programmed by Tod Frye and released in early 1983. You explore ten rooms laid out like the Kabbalah Tree of Life, collect and drop…
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Swordquest: Waterworld
Swordquest: Waterworld is the third and last of Atari's Swordquest adventure games for the 2600, programmed by Tod Frye. Like Earthworld and Fireworld, it asks you to place magical objects in the right rooms to reveal clues that…
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Tank Brigade
Tank Brigade is Panda's 1983 NTSC release of Phantom Tank, a tank battle game made by the Taiwanese company Bit Corporation. Panda sold it in North America as model 101. It is the same game as the other…
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Tanks But No Tanks
Tanks But No Tanks is a tank battle game for the Atari 2600, sold in North America in 1983 by Zimag, a label of Magnetic Tape International. The game itself was made by the Taiwanese company Bit Corporation,…
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