VCS Game Maker – Atari 2600 Game Engine

There has been an interesting rise of modern game engine for very retro hardware. One of the most popular (and polished) is GB Studio for creating GameBoy games. This project also lead to BB Studio for the NES, as well as GodotBoy for GB Studio. There is also Pyrite a powerful Unity-like game engine for creating N64 games. To that list we can add VCS Game Maker for creating Atari 2600 games.

VCS Game Maker is described as:

This online tool is a no-code environment designed to allow someone to create a game for Atari 2600 without knowing much about programming and without installing anything on their computer.

It uses Blockly to allow the user to implement the logic using blocks and then, behind the scenes, generates a Batari Basic source code, that is then be compiled using batari-basic-js in order to generate an Atari 2600 ROM, which is emulated using Javatari.

This is very much a work-in-progress.

VCS Game Maker is also free and open source under the MIT open source license.

Key Links

VCS Game Maker Homepage

VCS GitHub Repository

You can learn more about VCS Game Maker and see it in action in the video below.