Gamma-Attack
Gamma-Attack is a 1983 Atari 2600 shooter from Gammation, a small company run by programmer Robert L. Esken Jr. You fly a hovering saucer over a planet and destroy the enemy tanks below. The game itself is simple,…
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.
Fire Spinner
Fire Spinner is the name of a 1983 PAL cartridge sold in Europe on the Home Vision label, but the game you can play on this page is really Spinning Fireball, an unreleased NTSC prototype marked "Vidco (c)…
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The Entity
The Entity is an unreleased Atari 2600 game from 20th Century Fox, programmed by Mark Klein and based on the horror film of the same name. Instead of fighting the film's invisible force, you push it: by sliding…
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Dukes of Hazzard
Dukes of Hazzard is an unreleased Atari 2600 game from 1983, programmed by Mark R. Hahn and based on the TV series about the Duke cousins and their orange car, the General Lee. It never reached the shops,…
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Dumbo’s Flying Circus
Dumbo's Flying Circus is an unreleased Atari 2600 game from 1983, based on Disney's flying elephant. It was programmed by Peter Niday, with graphics by Jerome Domurat, and was planned as part of Atari's range of games for…
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Eddy Langfinger, der Museumsdieb
Eddy Langfinger, der Museumsdieb ("Eddy Lightfingers, the museum thief") is the German PAL release of the Atari 2600 game A Mysterious Thief, sold by the mail-order company Quelle. You play a burglar raiding a four-storey building against the…
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Elevator Action
Elevator Action for the Atari 2600 is an unreleased prototype. Dan Hitchens programmed it at Atari as a home version of Taito's 1983 arcade spy game, but the cartridge was never finished or sold. The surviving version is…
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