Release date: 1986
In 1986 the Atari 2600 got a second life. Jack Tramiel’s Atari Corporation relaunched it as a small, cheap model, later nicknamed the 2600 Jr., with adverts promising a price of “under 50 bucks”. The Atari 7800 finally went on sale in May, and Atari released games that had been finished years earlier and then left on the shelf.
All three games on this page belong to that comeback. Jr. Pac-Man, completed in 1984, came out in October, and the pinball game Midnight Magic followed in November, still showing a 1984 copyright on screen. Doug Neubauer’s Solaris, a space combat and exploration game from the creator of Star Raiders, arrived the same month.
All three can be played below, right in your browser.
Midnight Magic
Midnight Magic is a pinball game for the Atari 2600, programmed by Glenn Axworthy and published by Atari in 1986. It borrows its name from Broderbund's computer game David's Midnight Magic, but the table itself is a completely…
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Jr. Pac-Man
Jr. Pac-Man is the Atari 2600 version of the 1983 Bally Midway arcade game starring Pac-Man's son, who wears a propeller beanie. It was programmed at General Computer Corporation (GCC), with Ava-Robin Cohen as the credited programmer, and…
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