I won a copy of Atlantis II back in 1982. I had something like 48 hours to get as high a score as possible, take a Polaroid photo and express mail it back. I told my super skeptical dad I could win gold bullion and travel to Bermuda for the finals. I wound up with swim fins, a snorkel and a t-shirt all meant for a small child and the Atlantis II cartridge. Super fun game and challenge. I wound up parting with the game back in 2003. It financed a car, airline & hotel in New York and seats at Madison Square garden to see David Bowie. I understand it's kinda rare now (ha! ha!). Only differences between it and the regular Atlantis game were 1) It had a printed label on the outside of the box that was simply typed 'Atlantis II' . I recall after many years the adhesion of the label caused it to fall off. It left a glue mark and I kept the label. 2) Each target you hit was worth 1 point. 3) The speed of the game was, seemingly 5 to 10x faster than the fastest speed on the original Atlantis. 4) It only had a the night version background. I recall scoring no more that 500 or so on my best try. Super fun game and an even cooler company for 2600 games. Dragonfire is awesome. Subterranean is fantastic. Demon Attack to this day provides surprise and excellent game play.

Cosmic Ark is one of my all-time favourite Atari 2600 games; I find it extremely rewarding to get to the next planet to see what new aliens Space Noah needs to pick up. There's a real sense of progress and journey that few other 2600 games capture as well.

Riddle of the Sphinx was my jam back in the day! I think I got it in '82 and played the heck out of it. I event sent away for their hint book. Definitely in my top 5 2600 along with Yars Revenge, Enduro, Motorodeo and Pitfall.

“You’ve lasted this long in an Atari 2600 video after all” Me, drunk, making instant noodles: 👁👄👁

"Demon Attack" -- thank you! I played that game once at a friend's house circa 1982 and never knew what it was called, but the gameplay -- especially the way enemies come in from both sides of the screen to form a single creature -- stuck with me for years.

If you're debating making more of these videos, put my vote into the firm yes category. I really enjoy the publisher specific approach, and I think they help provide an often much needed context to the games that came after the earlier generations.

Demon Attack is one of my favorite Atari shooters and my favorite boxed game in my ENTIRE collection

Imagic did it's best work on Texas Instruments Home Computers. Super Demon Attack and Fathom were really good. Microsurgeon was out of this world technology-wise and there was nothing else quite like it.

The animation for the person you're trying to save in Fire Fighter is cracking me up! Waving arms and yelling in, what, 12 pixels? Hilarious!

I can explain 19:46!!! The Atari can only handle 4 sprites: 2 programmable sprites, a "ball", and a "bullet". To achieve the effect of multiple sprites on-screen, they're drawn multiple times vertically (notice that in a lot of games on the Atari like Demon Attack, the enemies never align each other on the Y axis. They're always spaced out. Double Dragon is also a good example of this as enemies are always on the top two sides of the stage). The only way to have the two sprites coexist horizontally is by duplicating them (see Space Invaders, notice that they all share the same "frame of animation" and are equal distances away from each other) or using flickering (see Pac-Man). I'm not *super* well versed in how it all works, but you can check out the book "Racing the Beam" for reference. It's quite fascinating. Now, why they didn't just use a work-around like flickering for a game where it's necessary to grab something quickly??? I dunno.

Okay I really wish I had helped you out with this video now, a lot of these look genuinely fun. That fathom game looks amazing.

Cosmic Ark and Star Voyager were two favorites of mine as a kid, but I loved Riddle of the Sphinx. That was the first adventure-style game on the system that I really got into, and it actually had an ending too, which was rare for the time.

I'm surprised Pete Rose Baseball doesn't have a level where you gamble the earnings of your game on your team and get banned from the Baseball Hall of Fame as a result.

A local friend of mine named his band "Ocean City Defender" and I'm still convinced it's the best band name ever. #BringBackZellers

We loved imagic. Even had the fan club magazine, numb thumb. Demon attack is probably the best space shooter on the system. Riddle of the sphynx took a lot of my after school hours to complete. And dragonfire is my all time favorite 2600 game (along with Hero and megamania). Love trying to get to the tougher dragons and better treasures.

I found Cosmic Ark incredibly addictive. I played that game to death!

Activision bought Imagic (what was left of it) acquiring the rights to its games

I would literally amaze my friends when I played Dragon Fire. I would go so fast, the dragon would go so fast, my friends couldn't even tell where my character was moving.

I loved Drag Race and Demon Attack. My cousin had them, but I could never find copies. Now I know why,

I really, really love Moonweeper. It overshadowed all of my Atari 2600 games when I bought it, and I still play it on emulators. It's simply amazing what Bob Smith could pack in 8 kilobytes, indeed it's a little technical miracle.

That Demon Attack cover is amazing. I had those exact same dollar store T-Rex and Dimetrodon toys as a kid... minus the chrome finish and rocket thrusters, obviously.

You mentioned that adaptations of board games don’t tend to age well - in my opinion, the NES version of Monopoly is an exception to that rule.

I loved Demon Attack (the best Phoenix Clone) and Atlantis (the best Missile Command clone).

Demon Attack, Fathom and Laser Gates were some of my most favorite games back in the day for the 2600. I also remember playing Dragonfire and Atlantis on a 2600 clone filled with various games. Never knew about Skate Boardin to be honest, but it looks fun. Imagic surely made some really great games for the 2600. Thanks for making this vid!

Cosmic Ark is one of the greatest 2600 games ever made.

To this day, I consider Dragonfire the Greatest 2600 game ever, considering gameplay, graphics, and story. Laser Gates might have the second confirmed Easter Egg in it, as fighting against an intergalactic computer, you shoot a wall with 6507 inscribed on it, the same number as the MOS chip powering the 2600. I absolutely loved Riddle of the Sphinx, but I never figured out how to beat it. All things considered, I think if I was given the choice of the Activision library or the IMagic library, I'd take the IMagic library, as I remember the games a bit more fondly and they seem to be more ambitious.

Anyone else remember the incredible rush as a kid when you got to buy an Imagic game then sit in front of your VCS looking at that silver box and that awesome logo just knowing it was going to be a good game? I used to get little kid chills...

Demon Attack with the wico TRACK BALL controller is a MUST TRY! It turns up the action and makes it more fun with higher scores!😲

I remember Riddle of the Sphinx. Go down to an oasis and grab the cane. Take it to the temple at the end. Tad-dah! You win.

If you do make a future video like this, I'd recommend ordering them as a chronology and providing release dates down to the day if possible. It's a more interesting format than pure randomness, and provides a context that is also interesting, for very little added effort.

It still amazes me that an ancient 40 year-old hardware that originally designed to play blocky games such as pong, break-out and combat could do all these !! Limitation really does breed creativity.

Riddle of the sphinx had a bit of a learning curve, but if you could get past that it was one of the best games. Very disappointed FrameRater didn't really give it enough of a chance.

Dragonfire is pretty dope, especially on Colecovision

Wow this video takes me back to my childhood, a couple of these games I used to play religiously and I haven’t thought of them in decades. Great job.

That land speed scrolling effect in Moonsweeper is some incredible 2600 programming. 😳

Imagic made the best looking games on the system. The had some real bangers too. You always know you are in for a good time when you see that silver cartridge.

Really enjoyed this video. Man I missed like 80% of theses back in the day and boy do I feel like I seriously missed out. Great content, keep it up!

I really enjoyed so many of the Imagic games and the boxes and cartridge art pics were the best.

I don't blame you, FrameRater. the Atari 2600 Library is a wild and unpredictable world to properly chart, and the wideness of it's rarity scale is beyond measure.

I officially love this channel now, thank you!

You’re totally taking me back to a time in my childhood I had completely forgotten about. I must find a way to play these games again!

I love these videos! It's great to see just where we've come from in gaming, from these blocky representations to realistic horse testicles in RDR2.

Love this channel , great video as always.

Thanks for this video. I had actually forgotten titles i was playing as a kid and this brought me back to those memories.

I just picked a sears tele-games recently and demon attack has been pretty much glued in the cartridge slot. (Demon attack and berzerk, but mostly demon attack)

Nice list! Atlantis and Demon Attack were one of my favorites when I was a kid.

Imagic was a fantastic developer. They somehow circumvented the clunkiness of Atari's limited capabilities, and created smooth, responsive, playable games with nice visuals and great animation.

"Atlantis," "Demon Attack," and "Riddle of the Sphinx" were my favorites.

I give Riddle of the Sphinx a 7. If I use my nostalgia with it, a 9. I was never sure how to 'beat' it, but I think by accident I figured out most of what things did and how to obtain them. I liked 2600 games of that nature, such as Adventure and dare I even say, ET. Games that had an ending and you had to figure it out.

Imagic was one of the best reasons to own an Intellivision. Beauty and the Beast was a much better Donkey Kong than DK itself IMO. And Atlantis was far more involved on that system, with the ability to fire each of the guns independently, and a ship you could deploy to dogfight with the incoming alien ships. Swords and Serpents was also very good on Intellivision. Thanks for the video, it was really interesting to see Imagic’s 2600 games.

19:41 I scrolled down a bit, but I didn't see anyone explain this, so I'll give it a try. Basically, the 2600 can only render a maximum of two sprites along a horizontal axis. There are a few technical exceptions to this, but basically, the Atari 2600 was only designed to render two playable sprites and a "ball". Technically, there shouldn't even be multiple baseball player sprites on the screen at once, but this only applies on a per-scanline basis. Atari 2600 has a cool trick in which additional sprites can be rendered as long as they don't intersect any scanlines occupied by two other sprites. So, you can technically have as many sprites as you want on the screen as long as they don't all move together to occupy the same set of scanlines. In other words, the reason that the other two other players cannot retrieve the ball is that they'd be intersecting a horizontal axis of the screen currently reserved for the pitcher as well as your baserunner. If the other two players cross into that horizontal field, it'll crash the game. There's a similar issue in the 2600 port of Double Dragon. Two enemies can be on the screen at once, but they can't both attack you at the same time because they can't move into each other's fields. Of course, there are exceptions to this, like Space Invaders, but that involves a very complex series of tricks working together, and is difficult for me to explain.

Loved Laser Gates as a child as well - and still like to play it whenever I dust off the Atari. It was called Space Channel over here in Germany.

great video!

Growing up Demon Attack was one of my favorite, if not most favorite 2600 game ever.

I subbed YESTERDAY. And a new video!

Man, Laser Gate looks absolutely amazing

I had Demon Attack. Fun and challenging game. This was cool, thanks

Great video. Nice work 👍 I discovered Laser Gates by watching and have been having fun with it

Nice breakdown of the games ! Riddle of the Sphinx was the only one I owned, but I palyed Atlantis and Cosmic Ark on friend's VCS.

Nice video, and nice list! Imagic was definitely one of the better third party game developers/publishers in their day. Absolute was pretty good too.

Demon Attack is the top Galaxian, Space invaders style shooter on the 2600. Amazing graphics and gameplay in the year of it's releases and for years afterwards. One of the examples of the 2600 version playing better than the Intellivision version

3:11 "Enemy ships do not fire at you." ... no, they just bleed radiation in a vertical line that destroys your cities. 11:15 "Only the bricks that fall can wipe out those nasty creatures." Except when you do a diagonal shot which also destroys the enemy.

Zellers...that's a name I haven't heard for some time.

I'm amazed by the graphics of some of these games... I had an Atari 2600 but I must have had earlier games cuz none of mine looked that good.

I love the completionist aspect of this. I was convinced I had only played the first 4 games mentioned here, but then when you got to "riddle of the sphinx" I realized a friend of mine owned it and we played it a bunch and could not figure it out either. Those are some neurons that haven't fired for almost 40 years.....very cool!

Riddles of the Sphinx is an amazing game. Once you start to figure it out, it offers endless hours of fun.

Riddle of the Sphinx is one of the more creative puzzle games for the 2600. You forgot to mention Imagic's contest back in the day when this came out. There is a solution video for it on KZfaq so give it a watch. RotS is a thinking game not an action game. The winner of that contest submitted his answer as a scroll with Egyptian hieroglyphics as Imagic did say they wanted the most creative correct answer. Laser Gates is interesting in that on the 2600 you shoot a 6507 but Laser Gates on the Atari 8-bit computer has the player shooting a 6502.

Every time I watch these kinds of videos, Degenatron keeps popping up in my head, heh. "You swing from green dot to green dot with your red square monkey!" Good series though, keep up the good work.

Demon Attack was easily one of my favorite games on the system. That game was endlessly fun. :-)

Does the artwork for Skateboarding day “Activision” on top or am I losing my mind? Also....GREAT video. I had no idea there were so many Imagic games!! Thanks for another great video.

Those morfs in the adds from the game to real life are hilarious.

Atlantis was one of the last games I got for my Atari. I got it for Christmas and it was around the time that all of my friends were getting Nintendos. I held the joystick backwards so I could to the direction I wanted to shoot instead of pointing to the cannon I wanted to fire. A friend of my brother or sister ( they are both older than me and were teens in the early 80’s) had Demon Attack. That was a fun game to play. I don’t think we ever got it because of the name.

After I picked up Demon Attack on a lark all those years ago, I was hooked on IMAGIC.

Nice job!

19:59 Hey,Caddicarus played that once!

I put a LOT of time into Cosmic Ark and Demon Attack when I was a kid. When you showed that badass box art, it immediately brought me back! 😂

Demon Attack: The only version with no boss demon at the end of a wave. Fire Fighter: Panicking flailing arm people in the buildings are hilarious looking. Quick Step: Unfiltered ADHD given form.

Have never seen Wing War on the 2600. I have it for the TI-99, but it's a very different looking game (more of a pure quest game) on that platform. Imagic ported a few of their 2600 titles to the TI, so it was fun to be able to compare them. I agree with your analysis of Fathom...it's a weird game, not awful, but that get repetitive pretty quickly. But it does get full points for thinking outside the box.

Oh man... several of these were favorites of mine back in the day!

That Shantae GIF with that music makes me smile every time I See it.

These games look great for the 2600

Trick shot was so much fun when I was a kid, we would have neighborhood tournaments!

Moonsweeper was my favourite game on the system, both for the fluid “analogue” gameplay and the impressive polished visuals. It is good to see someone else appreciates it - it seems to get basically no attention for some incomprehensible reason!

As a kid nearly 40 years ago I was lucky to at one time get hold of Demon Attack, that game still looks, sounds and plays great up to this day!

2:01 Paul Rudd, is that you again? You sure do love hanging around in retro game commercials, don't you?

Atlantis and Demon's attack my personal fave. Getting good at Atlantis with the side cannons means you can play for absolute ages

Moon sweeper was my favorite 2600 game. Absolutely loved that and yars revenge

When I was in jr high, back in Saratoga California, one of my friends ‘had a dad who worked at atari’ he had tons of games that were not in cartridge packages, just a chip on a board. I ended up with a lot of them. They weren’t all atari branded games. I guess I bring this up because those pirate cartridges you mentioned made me think of those game boards.

imagic and activision were my favorite 2600 publishers

I really like how the graphics (like at 1:56) morph from pixels to people!! :D

13:22 I always thought the princess or whatever it is, the blue thing, looked like Donald Duck.

Riddle of the Sphinx just looks like a guy in a speedo carrying a boogie board trying to find a good spot on the beach.

Frame, do you think you'll ever upload a BLOOD review on this channel? I'm Asking because I live in Kirkland, Washington & I got to meet Jace Hall in 2019 when my step-brother Dean worked at Monolith Productions. I asked Jace about BLOOD & why ATARI/Infogrames is holding the BLOOD IP at knifepoint, he said that he'd like to scoop up the BLOOD IP ASAP once Infogrames goes under & that day might come sooner than you think as Atari has made bad business decisions that are starting to come back to bite them.

@6:52 holy crap its Ecco 2 before Ecco 2. Were they inspired by this game because playing as a dolphin that can turn into a bird is a hellof a conincidence

No, it's not a random chance your middle base respawns in Atlantis, you get a building restored every 10,000 points at the end of that wave. Your middle base always respawns first, but if you have more then one building lost and survive another 10,000 points without losing your middle base, one of those buildings will respawn. In theory you can rebuild the entire city from 1 building remaining if you really get in the groove.

imagic is my favorite company to collect for. absolutely great collection of games. the only thing this video needs is an addendum with the intellivison games added because they're very weird. games like microsurgeon might be one of the strangest games of that era

I was hoping you would have caught on the cover of Star Voyager they used a Millenium Falcon model

On the Intellivision, the Imagic games were the best out there. Awesome gameplay and great graphics.

Riddle of the Sphinx was a total classic to me

I miss the older rating system but still great vid!