Tunnel Runner

Tunnel Runner was published in 1983 by CBS Electronics for the Atari 2600 and is one of the most technically interesting cartridges on the platform. It places the player inside a maze traversed through a pseudo-three-dimensional corridor view - on a machine with no frame buffer, whose picture is assembled line by line in real time.\n\nCBS Electronics achieved this with extra memory built into the cartridge itself. That approach, where a module supplied its own RAM on top of the console's 128 bytes, enabled effects standard cartridges could not manage, and Tunnel Runner is its best-known example.\n\nThe game itself is simple and tense: you search for a route through the maze, orient yourself with a map shown between passages, and evade pursuers. The real mechanic is your own memory - you must retain the layout, because inside a corridor you can see only a short distance ahead.\n\n1983 was also the year the American games market collapsed; much of what shipped then vanished, and companies like CBS Electronics left the industry altogether. That makes the survival of this technically ambitious piece all the more notable.\n\nOn OldGame.cz the game runs directly in your browser. It is a single-player title, and a few minutes are enough to understand why people still remember it.

How collectors view this cartridge is worth adding. Cartridges with extra memory are technically different from ordinary modules, and emulating them required dedicated support, which in the early years of emulators meant the game either refused to start or misbehaved. Today that support is reliable and the title runs without trouble.