Atari released more than 100 games for the Atari 2600 between 1977 and 1990, but the publisher also produced dozens of prototypes that never made their way onto store shelves. Aquaventure is one such game… though it did eventually manage to escape from the briny deep.
Originally created in 1983, a prototype cartridge for Aquaventure was discovered at a flea market nearly a decade later. The game was later uploaded to the Internet and shared among the still-active Atari 2600 community.
If you’re interested in playing Aquaventure, you’ll actually soon be able to do so on an original console, as the company’s Atari XP label plans to publish the game for the Atari 2600 (and yes, it comes on a real Atari 2600 cartridge) sometime in the next few months. If you’d rather keep your old hardware in storage, Aquaventure is also accessible through the Atari Flashback X microconsole, which was released in 2019, as well as the Atari Flashback Classics collection for the PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
It’s great that we’re finally getting a chance to play this lost game, but there’s just one problem, we don’t actually know who made it.
Aquaventure is completely absent from any internal memos or status reports from the 1980s kept by Atari, and the two credited developers (Tod Frye and Gary Shannon) have no recollection of working on the game. Atari expert Matt Reichert explored this mystery in a recent post on AtariXP.com:
The origins of the original Aquaventure prototype are a bit hazy. It is thought to have been discovered by a collector at a flea market in central Florida in the mid 1990s. Eventually, this collector brought the prototype to a gaming gathering where it was dumped and distributed along with several other Atari 2600 prototypes among collectors.
By the late 1990s Aquaventure had made its way into the hands of many collectors, but it kept a relatively low-profile. It wouldn’t be until its inclusion on the Atari Flashback 2 console in 2005 that the game would reach a wide audience.
Atari is looking for any information about the original developer of Aquaventure. If you know anything, you can share it with the publisher through their social media team on Facebook and Twitter.
While it’s always fun to have a mystery on our hands, it’s important to remember that this version of Atari is not the same company as the one founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972. After a series of bankruptcies and buyouts, this is actually the sixth iteration of the game publisher, and any connection to the original Atari was lost long ago. In addition to the Atari XP initiative, the Atari of 2022 has a lot of different projects in the hopper, including the Atari VCS microconsole, the Recharged series of retro reboots, a cryptocurrency division, and a partnership to build Atari-branded hotels.
All that said, it’s encouraging that the current owners of the Atari brand remain interested in the company’s vast history. And hopefully that includes finding and properly crediting the original programmer behind Aquaventure.