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.
Survival Island is a 1983 action-adventure by Starpath, programmed by Scott Nelson. It was not sold as a normal cartridge but on cassette tape for the Starpath Supercharger, an add-on that plugged into the Atari 2600's cartridge slot,…
Play ▸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 ▸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…
Play ▸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…
Play ▸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…
Play ▸Stronghold is a space shooter for the Atari 2600 from CommaVid, a small company from Aurora, Illinois. It was programmed by Joseph Biel, one of CommaVid's three founders. You attack a series of fortified asteroids, fighting off drones…
Play ▸Subterranea is a 1983 action game from Imagic for the Atari 2600, programmed by Mark Klein. You fly a Cave Ranger down through a series of underground tunnels, clearing out flying robots and slipping through electrified gates on…
Play ▸Super Cobra is Parker Brothers' 1983 Atari 2600 version of Konami's 1981 arcade game. You fly a helicopter through eleven levels of hostile terrain, firing missiles and bombs at ground guns, rockets, fireballs and mines while keeping an…
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