Starpath Supercharger

In 1982, a small company called Starpath released an accessory for the Atari 2600 called the Supercharger. The Supercharger plugged into the 2600's cartridge port, and added 6K of RAM and a cable that plugged into any audio cassette deck's headphone jack. (You provided the tape deck.) The idea was to distribute games on cassette rather than cartridge, reducing their cost. The Supercharger did more than that though. It allowed all of its memory to be used as RAM (in addition to the 2600's 128 bytes, for a total of 6 1/8K), where ordinary cartridges were stuck with 4K or 8K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. And it allowed developers to test their games more quickly.

Three of the Supercharger's games are considered among the best ever made for the 2600: Dragonstomper, Escape From the Mindmaster, and Phaser Patrol. These games were equal to what was being made for home computers like the Apple II, Atari 8 Bit Computers, and Commodore 64.

The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 was the end of Starpath; it was bought by Epyx. The games were later re-released on CD as Stella Gets A New Brain.

The Supercharger library:

Communist Mutants From Space, a Space Invaders clone
Dragonstomper, the 2600's only true Role-Playing Game ^[1]
Escape From the Mindmaster, a Faux First Person 3D puzzle game
Fireball, a Breakout clone
Frogger
Killer Satellites
Party Mix
Phaser Patrol, a Star Raiders clone
Rabbit Transit
Suicide Mission, an Asteroids clone
Survival Island
Sword of Saros

↑ Adventure is considered to be an Action Adventure game (and the first) but it does not have enough RPG elements to be considered a true RPG.

[1] Adventure is considered to be an Action Adventure game (and the first) but it does not have enough RPG elements to be considered a true RPG.

[1]