The Atari 2600 Homebrew Companion Volume 1

The Atari 2600 Homebrew Companion Volume 1 was written by Brian Matherne with a foreword by Michael Thomasson from GoodDealgames.com. This book covers a nice cross-section of Atari 2600 homebrew games spanning 1995 through the present day. If you are not familiar with what a homebrew game is, as the book explains, it is an original game, programmed from the ground up, and completed for the system. So essentially a new game idea brought to fruition often by a non-professional source.

This book covers some 35 of these homebrew games, one of which, Mappy, is currently a work in progress.

The games are arranged alphabetically and the author includes title screen images as well as gameplay screenshots from most of the games covered in the book. There are also images of game boxes and cartridges sprinkled in throughout. I appreciate how each game is broken into its various sections; background, release notes, gameplay, options, controls, scoring, design, strategy, analysis and it’s done consistently throughout the book. There’s a lot of relevant detail woven into those sections. It reminds me a lot of what the Atari 2600 Encyclopedia Volume One should have been but didn’t quite achieve, a zen-like level of consistency, accuracy, and detail. It’s also the kind of detail I strive to include in my video reviews so I have to give him a lot of credit for that. The release notes and strategy are of specific interest to me. Here we catch of glimpse of the game development history and the best ways to approach completing them.

I appreciate the graphical design of the books cover art, which took inspiration from several homebrew games including “Halo 2600”, “The conquest of Mars” and “Spies in the night”. It’s a really nice touch. You can’t look at the cover without Halo coming to mind.

If you’re the type of person that tends to forget the author’s name, this book will not let you. The author’s name is printed on the backside of every single page. The book contains a nice table of contents that lists all of the game titles, however for some reason the page numbers listed are all off by one page. Not a huge deal, but I thought it was strange.

Overall, this book has me yearning for more. I want more games, a bigger book, more analysis, more, more, more, I can’t get enough of it. While on that point Brian has posted on the Atari.io forums that volume 2 is nearing completion. I’d love to see this format used for other consoles as well such as the Atari 5200 & 7800.

I purchased the paperback version, which is printed in black and white and is available for $12.99. After many requests, the full-color version of the book was released and is available from Amazon.com for about $30. If that sounds too pricey you can still purchase the ebook version for about $4 and it’s also available for the Kindle for 99 cents.

This is one of those types of books the homebrew community didn’t know it needed but now we need more of it. It’s really nicely polished and is packed full of information. There was a ton of research put into this book, reading through it you will most definitely discover a game you had not known about. Right now, and I mean this with all due respect and speaking from experience, the Atari 2600 Homebrew Companion Volume One makes for the perfect bathroom companion. But Seriously I liken this book to a portable encyclopedia of homebrew titles.

Highly recommended.

Color Version available at Amazon for $30:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1981060898

Kindle version $1.99

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