Atari Is Releasing A 2600 Console Game That Was Lost For Over 30 Years

On Friday, Atari announced a unique opportunity for classic game aficionados on its social media pages. Effective immediately, it is taking preorders for a special limited-edition cartridge release of "Save Mary" for the Atari 2600 console (also known as the Atari Video Computer System or Atari VCS). According to Atari's post, the game "was canceled in development when Atari 2600 game production ended in 1990, ending a 13-year run." This new release is limited to just 500 cartridges.

The Atari 2600's original run started in 1977 and ended with 1992's European release of "Klax." That was almost a decade after the 1983 video game console crash, where the market was flooded by numerous competing consoles and, particularly for the 2600, overhyped, poor-quality games, which led to a massive loss of trust in the industry by consumers. This is why, when Nintendo brought its Famicom console to the United States in 1985, it was rebranded as the Nintendo Entertainment System and redesigned to look like a VCR: to avoid the stigma of being a video game console.

"Save Mary" is the latest in the Atari XP series of limited-edition releases of actual 2600 cartridges. As described by Atari, the cartridges "are newly made in the United States of high-quality materials and manufactured to exacting standards." "Save Mary" is not the first "new" game that has been rescued from the heap of canceled late-stage 2600 games, though: That was "Mr. Run and Jump," earlier this year.

As for "Save Mary" specifically? The gameplay revolves around building a platform for the titular Mary to use to escape a flooding canyon. It was hyped up in the gaming press during its development, with even Atari founder Nolan Bushnell praising it in a 1989 interview in the first issue of Atarian, an Atari-centric magazine.

"Then there's one called [']Saving [sic] Mary['] which I really like," Bushnell told Atarian. "It is the first game in which you rely on construction rather than destruction to save the princess. You build towers at the base of a river gorge to keep Mary out of the water, which is constantly rising. You have an unlimited supply of building materials, but you can lose a life by either squashing Mary with a piece of building material or building so slowly that you fail to get her out of the water and she drowns. The guilt you feel is tremendous."

"Save Mary" has been available to the public as a ROM dump for decades, though, as prototype cartridges were first discovered in 1997.