TL;DR

From an absolute "cool" factor and nostalgic gaming perspective, I'm not really sure it gets any better than someone on the internet today (in 2025) finding and posting a newly found-and-harvested Atari 2600 game demo ROM on the AtariAge forum for the world to consume!

Well, I'm definitely not passing that up. I had to go find it, play it, burn it, add it to my tangible collection and live to tell!

Read on!

Fish (The Game)

From what I am reading, this was a never-released Atari 2600 demo game that either:

• Was found on an old tape backup of the VAX mainframe used for shared development between engineering groups at Atari
• Another game developer at Atari in a different engineering group made, perhaps "for fun"
• The game was passed along to someone else for review or feedback.

Here's to hoping now that this game has found daylight and traction, that some more credible information starts to come out from sources involved!

For (way) more information that I'm going to repeat, check out this fabulous resource from atariprotos.com.

Demo Time!

After downloading, the fastest way to check this out was to immediately launch it in Stella.

On game start, it's got a nice "chip" melody that's almost hill-billy banjo like! What's not to like about that? After that interlude, all emulation game navigation and play can be done with your arrow-keys and space-bar.

Simply stated: navigate and use your space-bar to time the effort of gobbling the worms, fish eggs, squid all while avoiding the 'big fish'.

Tip: If you gobble a 'squid', you'll grow into a 'big fish' yourself and you can gobble up the big fish chasing you! Cool!

ROM and Cartridge Time!

What are we waiting for? Let's make this game tangible, already! And of course, it goes without saying: I have the "stuff" to do it!

Because this game is 4k, it will natively load on any Atari platform with ease --- it also makes it pretty simple to write the game straight out to a modern-era EPROM without worrying about bankswitching, extra PLC or logic the game developer would have had to do if the game was, at all, larger than 4k and all that jazz.

Here's some glamour shots of loading up the .bin and writing it out to an AM2732B EPROM with my MCUMall GQ 4x4 programmer, then slapping that EPROM into 3d-printed cartridge and PCB for 2k/4k games I already had lying around:

Where Can I Download 'Fish'?

The 'Fish' game is posted and hosted on AtariAge forums. You can find it here.

Final Thoughts?

This game has zero learning curve; without knowing anything, you figure out what to do instantly! It's got a lot of similarities to other worthwhile Atari 2600 titles worth mentioning, such as Seaquest, Dolphin, Shark! and really pushing it, but in terms of little fish/big fish dodgery, Fishing Derby.

The game design is really impressive; it's game sprite gradients are graphically polished-as-hell and --- not to mention --- only 4k in game size? Hats off and well done.

One of the more impressive "design" pieces that really stuck out to me is the fish sprite animation when turning from left to right; they actually render in 2D space what the fish would look like turning that half circle from one direction to the other:

All I can say is: This is a top-shelf Atari 2600 game for me. I'm super thankful it's been pulled from the "bit mud" and shared! If this would have made the commercial release light-of-day, wow! Instant classic, IMHO! It's that good.

Lastly, as you can see below, this game has absolutely earned a spot in my official, tangible line-up of rebuilt, home-made Atari 2600 game cartridges, and it's not going anywhere any time soon!

Resources / Credits

• A New Unreleased Atari 2600 Prototype Has Just Been Discovered (timeextension.com)
• New game discovered for the 2600 and released! Fish (atariage.com)
• Fish (Atari 2600 Prototype) (atariprotos.com)