Mouse Trap

Mouse Trap started at Exidy as a coin-op, and the Atari 2600 version was published by Coleco. The 1981 date in the record belongs to the arcade original — the 2600 cartridge reached shops once Coleco had the licence, so the console release is usually dated a year later.

The design is a maze chase with collection. You steer a mouse through the labyrinth, pick up cheese and stay clear of pursuers, while coloured buttons flip the doors in the corridors so you open and close your own routes as you go. There is also a transformation that briefly turns the hunted mouse into the hunter. Anyone who played maze coin-ops of the era recognises the structure instantly.

The Atari 2600 was thin hardware even by 1981 standards: 128 bytes of RAM, two sprites, and a picture the processor had to assemble line by line as the beam drew it. Maze games on the console were therefore simplified, colour schemes were unified, and the number of moving objects on screen was kept low.

This is a single-player game with no ending in the modern sense. It continues while your lives last and the score is the whole measure of success — the exact model that kept people at arcade cabinets and travelled home with them.

OldGame.cz runs Mouse Trap in the browser window, so no emulator setup is needed.