Mountain King

Mountain King, released for the Atari 2600 in 1983, belongs to the group of games that extracted far more from that machine than anyone expected. The 2600 launched in 1977 with a tiny amount of memory and a video chip incapable of holding a screen in memory at all; the image was assembled line by line by the program itself as the beam swept down the display.

Against that background it is striking that Mountain King offers an interconnected underground maze you climb up and down through, collecting points and searching for specific objects. It commits to an idea that was rare on the 2600 in 1983: the environment is not one screen with a repeating pattern but a continuous space in which orientation actually means something.

What earned the game most of its reputation, though, is the audio. It plays In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg, and on hardware offering two coarse sound channels with famously imprecise tuning that was a genuine technical achievement. The music also functions as a guide, since its volume tells you whether you are approaching your objective.

The mechanics are simple, but the game expects you to work out rules it never explains anywhere on screen, which is exactly how games of that year operated. It is single-player. You can run it directly in your browser on OldGame.cz, with nothing to install.