Best Atari 2600 Games Worth Playing Today
The Atari VCS came out in 1977 and was later renamed the Atari 2600. It had 128 bytes of RAM, less memory than the text of this paragraph takes up. Programmers had to draw every line of the picture while the television was drawing it, and that limit pushed them into some very clever designs.
Hundreds of games came out for it. These are the ones that are still worth playing, in order of release.
The games
- Combat (Atari, 1977)
- The game that came in the box. Two players, tanks and planes, and a lot of variations. Simple, but it showed what a home console could be for.
- Adventure (Atari, 1980)
- Warren Robinett turned a text adventure into a game you could see: a square hero, a sword, keys, castles and dragons. He also hid his own name in a secret room, one of the first known Easter eggs in a video game.
- Space Invaders (Atari, 1980)
- The first licensed arcade game on the system, with dozens of variations. It gave people a reason to buy the console.
- Boxing (Activision, 1980)
- Bob Whitehead's two-minute fight seen from above. Simple controls and a real sense of timing. We wrote a whole page about how Boxing worked.
- Kaboom! (Activision, 1981)
- Designed by Larry Kaplan. A bomber drops bombs and you catch them in buckets with the paddle controller. It gets fast very quickly.
- Freeway (Activision, 1981)
- David Crane's chickens cross ten lanes of traffic against the clock. Two players race side by side.
- Pitfall! (Activision, 1982)
- David Crane again. Pitfall Harry runs through a jungle of vines, crocodiles and tar pits, looking for treasure against a time limit. It packed a large world into a tiny cartridge.
- River Raid (Activision, 1982)
- Carol Shaw's scrolling shooter along a river. You manage fuel as well as enemies, and the river is generated so that it is the same every time.
- Yars' Revenge (Atari, 1982)
- Howard Scott Warshaw's strange and original shooter, with a flying insect, a shifting shield and a flickering neutral zone. Nothing else looks like it.
- Enduro (Activision, 1983)
- Larry Miller's endurance race runs through day, night, fog and snow, all on hardware that was never meant to draw a road.
- H.E.R.O. (Activision, 1984)
- John Van Ryzin's hero flies down mine shafts with a helicopter backpack to rescue trapped miners.
Why so many of them are from Activision
Activision was founded in 1979 by former Atari programmers, among them David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead. It was one of the first companies to make games for a console it did not own, and it printed the designers' names on its boxes. Several of the best games on the system came from that small team.
How to play them now
Original cartridges still turn up second hand, and Atari's 2600+ console, released in 2023, plays them. If you want something with the same feel in your browser, our games are original but built on the same short, simple rules: Wingweight is our boxing game seen from above, Pilgrim's Crossing is a lane-crossing game, and Seal Breaker is a brick breaker.