RealSports Curling

RealSports Curling is a modern, unofficial game for the Atari 5200, designed and programmed by Ryan Witmer, which, unlike the other titles on this list, was not created in the 1980s but decades later as a fan project released by the community around AtariAge. The game simulates curling, a winter sport in which players slide stones across an ice surface toward a target and try to place them as close to its center as possible, or knock the opponent's stones away and take their place. The controls use the Atari 5200's analog stick for smooth adjustment of the throw's power and direction, which the author presented as a demonstration of what the console with this control scheme can still do decades after its release and without knowledge of the official hardware documentation.

The game supports up to eight players taking turns on a single console and offers a variable match length based on the number of ends, allowing it to be adapted to either a quick game or a full tournament following the rules of real curling. The visuals are very clean by homebrew scene standards - the ice surface is shown from a bird's-eye view, the stones and the target are clearly legible, and the game also offers a computer-controlled opponent with a reasonable difficulty level. Along with the game, the complete source code in assembly was also released, a gesture appreciated in the Atari 5200 developer community as it makes further homebrew projects easier.

RealSports Curling shows that even a console nearly forty years old can host entirely new, carefully crafted sports titles, given an enthusiast willing to invest the time to study its hardware. For fans of the platform, it is a welcome expansion of the sports lineup with a discipline the official RealSports series never covered, and at the same time proof that the homebrew scene around the Atari 5200 remains active and creative even after decades, capable of carrying a game from its first demo versions all the way to a finished, sellable cartridge.

Why play it: For fans of the platform, as proof that the homebrew scene around the Atari 5200 remains active even after decades and is capable of carrying a carefully crafted new game all the way to a finished cartridge.