Warlords - Still one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time.
Demon Attack - My favorite 2600 Space Invaders descendant. Love the glowy graphics, the pulsing music, and the tricky alien movements.
Pitfall 2 – In terms of its size and its musical score, one of the most ambitious games ever made for the 2600. It’s pretty amazing they were able to squeeze so much out of that ancient hardware.
Adventure - The “Citizen Kane” of blocky games with duck-dragons and annoying bats.
Armor Ambush - A refined version of Combat’s tank battle.
Cosmic Ark - The only action game on the 2600 that can get you into a fugue state vaguely approximating that of arcade Robotron.
Frogs and Flies - One of the most relaxing 2600 games… perfect for head-to-head sessions. I love the day/night transition.
Ms. Pac-Man - A fitting apology for the botched Pac-Man port.
Kaboom! - Super-simple, super-fast.
Enduro - Another really atmospheric game. The day/night and weather changes lend an epic quality to this racing game.
It’s going to be tough to get to 10 for me, at least from memory, but I’ll call out a few that really made an impression on me:
Space Invaders - my cousin and I stayed up until the wee hours playing this the day I got my 2600 (my first console!) and just had the time of our lives. I can’t abide this game for more than 5 minutes now.
Missile Command - I was obsessed with this game in the arcades so the option to play at home was a no-brained for me. The graphics were chunky of course but it was a really faithful port that played well.
Yar’s Revenge - this was my “zen state” game, I could tune in and lose an hour easily. It made very little sense, had a weird tacked-on story, but it didn’t need any of that. It was perfect on its own.
As an honorable mention, I gotta throw in Pac Man. Yeah, the original that everyone hated. I didn’t find out how widely hated it was until much later - my friends and I couldn’t get enough. Looking back with a more critical eye, it’s easier to see; the graphics were rough and flickery and the sound effects were weak and overall it bore little resemblance to its arcade ancestor. But it was fucking Pac Man that I could play at home, and nine year old me would drop the mic right there.
If it’s any consolation, I do remember some of these games from the arcade, I think. Definitely Ms Pac Man. Arcades used to be so much more powerful than consoles back then. Even up through the era of N64/PS1. Dreamcast was the first console where an arcade game looked better on the console than in the arcade (Soul Calibur).
1)Escape From the Mindmaster (Starpath): Best and maybe the only puzzily game on the 2600
2)River Raid (Activision) I never would have guessed the 2600 could play a game like this when it first came out.
3)Adventure: How coould a game so ugly capture the spirit of exploration?
4)Pitfall: You couldn’t get lazy and make it far.
5)Video Pinball: Another fun high score chase game. Gotta nudge that ball through the multiplier lane!
6)Dragon Stomper (starpath): I can’t remember why I loved this game, but I did.
7)Grand Prix (Activision) Awesome looking game for its time. Compared to night driver it was incredible.
8)Frogger (Activision): Simple. Didn’t have to play for an hour to beat a high score.
9)Breakout: Fun high score chase game.
10)Missile Command: Could get pretty frenetic at the end.
I had well over 100 games when we had our garage sale where I sold them all for like $2-$3 a piece.
1)Frostbite, but that game would be in my top 5 of all-time: Steve Cartwright’s arcade game is ne of the finest, more approachable single screen example of the genre ever made, with an awesome theme to boot.
2)Ms. Pac-Man: When I played Pacman after playing Ms. Pacman, I was so sad for the people who came before! It is Pacman with tons and tons of variety.
3)H.E.R.O.: I feel it is one of the granddaddies of the whole roguelite genre. A game of action, plus some strategy, some luck, some familiar yet not always the same patterns.
4)Beamrider: While it is just a poor man’s Tempest I guess, it is nice visual and sound trip.
5)Pressure Cooker: The 2600 had a host of those single screen arcade games that just don’t get old!
6)River Raid: first vertical scrolling shoot’em up (with fuel management: can’t let you fly around that easily!). Absolutely mind blowing.
7)Pitfall: it is the game I wanted to get an Atari 2600 for. If only the map had made any sense!
8)Enduro: Like @Gordon_Cameron said, more than the game itself, it was the atmosphere, especially the brilliant and terrifying use of darkness at night that made this one special.
9)Berkserk: An action shooting game I hated at first, for its sluggish controls, it’s mechanical, dark soundscape… But the more I played it, the more I got drawned in. I much prefer its C64 spiritual successors, the Crossroads games.
10)Millipede: intense, insane shooting game. The Ms. Pacman to Centipede!
Berserk was a really great port of the arcade game. It didn’t do the voice synthesis though did it? I remember being really amazed by that when I played Impossible Mission, so I’m thinking that may have been the first instance of voice in a game. That I played anyway.
Adventure. As popularized by “Ready Player One”, the first video game easter egg.
Also Pitfall and River Raid. Honorable mention to Space Invaders, which was one of the early games on the platform (the one I bought the system for – or, to be more accurate, the one I convinced my dad to buy the platform for).
I didn’t have the 2600, but I remember playing a lot of River Raid, Pitfall, Space Invaders, Qbert, Basketball and Boxing at my cousins and friends.
Also, the awful Pac-Man port, though at the time it was just incredible to play video games at home. (Though my mind wasn’t blown until the Colecovision port of Donkey Kong that was SO close to the arcade. Fun times.)
Oh man, I remember that - it’s Frankenstein right? You had to climb to the top to do something to keep the monster from reanimating? Ok maybe I don’t remember everything.
You had to collect bricks from the bottom of the screen and wall him up. Remember? I think there was a screen where you had to dodge bats. I lent the cartridge to a friend and it came back all fucked. Sad!
