Browse the older games on this site and you will keep seeing notes like “Sears title: Chase” or “Sears title: Race”. Some page addresses even carry two names, such as Combat / Tank Plus or Outlaw / Gunslinger. They are the same games. For years, Atari’s cartridges were also sold in Sears department stores under the store’s own Tele-Games label, often with a different name on the box. Here is how that deal came about, how the names changed, and the three games you could only buy at Sears.
It started with Pong
The Sears connection is older than the VCS. In 1975 Atari had a home version of Pong but no way to sell it widely. Nolan Bushnell got in touch with Sears after seeing an advert for the Magnavox Odyssey in the sporting goods section of its catalogue. A Sears buyer, Tom Quinn, liked the game and offered Atari an exclusive deal. Bushnell said Atari could make 75,000 units for Christmas; Quinn asked for twice that. Atari needed new investment and a new factory to fill the order.
The first units went on sale between late October and mid-November 1975 with Sears’ Tele-Games name on them, at $98.95 plus $7.95 for the optional AC adapter. About 150,000 were sold that season. It became Sears’ most successful product at the time and earned Atari a Sears Quality Excellence Award. The Tele-Games brand, and the partnership, carried straight on into the cartridge era.
The Sears Video Arcade
From 1977 Sears sold the Atari VCS as the Tele-Games Video Arcade. Inside it was the same machine, made by Atari, with a white paper label underneath saying it was made for Sears, Roebuck and Co. The outside was a little different: aluminium trim, “Tele-Games” printed in green capitals above the cartridge slot and “Video Arcade” in chrome letters on the front. Sears also sold its own paddle controllers. Over the years it released several models, and the last one made just for Sears, the Video Arcade II, came out in the autumn of 1982, packed with two controllers and Space Invaders. Its design was the one Atari later used for the Japan-only Atari 2800.
Sears did the same with Atari’s rival. Mattel’s Intellivision was sold in Sears stores as the Super Video Arcade, with a beige top and detachable controllers.
Why a different name? No source we found gives Sears’ reasons for each title. But it matched how Sears sold most things. The store built its own brands, such as Kenmore for appliances and Craftsman for tools, and it often sold other companies’ products under a Sears label. A Tele-Games console with Tele-Games cartridges was one more Sears product line.
Same game, new name
Sears cartridges had their own model numbers and came with both text labels and picture labels, just like Atari’s. Look at which games were renamed and a pattern appears. The early Atari titles, many of them from the 1977 launch, got plain names that tell you what you are doing: Race, Chase, Baseball, Target Fun. The big licensed arcade games of the early 1980s kept their names, which makes sense when the arcade name was the main selling point. Sears sold Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, Defender and Pac-Man under the same titles Atari used. So did original games such as Adventure and Yars’ Revenge.
These are the renamed games you can play here:
| Atari title | Sears Tele-Games title |
|---|---|
| Combat | Tank Plus |
| Air-Sea Battle | Target Fun |
| Indy 500 | Race |
| Street Racer | Speedway II |
| Surround | Chase |
| Star Ship | Outer Space |
| Video Olympics | Pong Sports |
| Breakout | Breakaway IV |
| Outlaw | Gunslinger |
| Space War | Space Combat |
| Home Run | Baseball |
| Hangman | Spelling |
| Slot Racers | Maze |
| Flag Capture | Capture |
| Hunt & Score | Memory Match |
| Casino | Poker Plus |
| Sky Diver | Dare Diver |
| Slot Machine | Slots |
| Human Cannonball | Cannon Man |
| Miniature Golf | Arcade Golf |
| Dodge ‘Em | Dodger Cars |
| Maze Craze | Maze Mania |
| Video Checkers | Checkers |
| Video Pinball | Arcade Pinball |
| Circus Atari | Circus |
| Pelé’s Soccer | Soccer |
One Sears name goes the other way from the rest. Video Olympics is a cartridge of Pong-style bat-and-ball games, and Sears called it Pong Sports, using the name of the arcade game it came from and of the Tele-Games Pong machines Sears had been selling since 1975.
The three Sears exclusives
Atari made three 2600 games that were only ever sold by Sears. According to AtariProtos, they were part of the deal: Sears wanted a few titles of its own, and Atari let it have these three. None of them was expected to be a big seller. AtariProtos also mentions a claim that Sears got games Atari had rejected. Atari denied this, and there is no firm evidence either way.
Steeplechase
Steeplechase is Jim Huether’s version of a 1975 arcade horse race developed by Kee Games and published by Atari. In the arcade, up to six players each press a coloured button to make their horse jump the fences in its lane. The 2600 version uses paddles, two per controller port, so up to four people can race at once. AtariProtos calls it the best of the three exclusives. On this site the emulator switches to paddle mode automatically, and Alt+L toggles between paddle and joystick mode.
Stellar Track
Stellar Track, by Rob Zdybel, was called Stella Trek during development. It is a 2600 version of the text-based Star Trek game that ran on university mainframes in the early 1970s. You command a warship and must destroy enough enemies before your stardates run out. The galaxy has 36 quadrants of 64 sectors each; you scan them, warp in, and give orders like raising shields or firing torpedoes. The 2600 has no built-in text characters, so the screen of text is drawn with the “Venetian blinds” trick, splitting the letters between alternating lines. That is also why it looks odd in screenshots. Reviews at the time were cool. The Space Gamer told readers to “pass this one up”, while Joystik called it “a good game for non-violent strategists”.
Submarine Commander
Submarine Commander, by Matthew Hubbard, came out in September 1982 and is based on Midway’s periscope arcade game Sea Wolf II. You look through a periscope that turns a full 360 degrees and hunt targets while watching the radar, a depth charge detector, the fuel gauge and the engine temperature. There are eight game modes: one or two players, each at four difficulty levels. Joystik called it a “very basic shooting-gallery type game” in December 1982, but the Video Games Critic website gave it a B+ in 2012.
A fourth, for a few months
Super Breakout was a Sears exclusive at first. It came out in October 1981 with Tele-Games branding, and Atari’s own version followed in January 1982. Unlike Breakout, it was not renamed: the Sears cartridge says Super Breakout too.
Other companies noticed too
Other publishers made sure that people who owned a Sears console knew their cartridges would work in it. The manual for Telesys’ Fast Food, for example, says on its first page that it “plays on the Atari Video Computer System and Sears Tele-Game Video Arcade”, and adds that Tele-Game and Video Arcade are trademarks of Sears, Roebuck and Co.
For collectors
Some Sears cartridges are much harder to find today than their Atari twins. AtariAge’s rarity guide rates Steeplechase and Stellar Track “Scarce+”, Submarine Commander “Rare”, and the Sears Super Breakout “Scarce”, while the Atari Super Breakout is “Common+”. Rarity does not always mean value, though. For the older Pong machines, Wikipedia notes that the Sears Tele-Games versions often sell for less than the Atari-branded ones.
Play the Sears catalogue here
You do not need to hunt for a Sears cartridge to play these games. The Sears archive on this site lists the games that were sold under the Tele-Games label, and the three exclusives are playable from their own pages. If you only try three:
- Steeplechase: the best of the exclusives, and the emulator handles the paddles for you.
- Submarine Commander: a first-person periscope game from 1982, which was unusual on the 2600.
- Stellar Track: one of the few real strategy games on the console. Take your time with it.
