Board Games to Pixels: Parker Brothers on the Atari 2600

I’ve looked at quite a few companies that published games on the Atari 2600. While many of them were shut down in 1983 and 1984 following the North American Video Game Crash, some kept going. A few companies left the video game market but kept going because of other business ventures. This brings us to Parker Brothers.

I’ll always remember this company for board games—specifically Clue, or Cluedo, as it is known in other parts of the world. Thankfully, we don’t see a video game adaptation of Clue on the Atari 2600.

The story of Parker Brothers is fascinating. The company was founded in 1883 by George Parker and was purchased by Hasbro in 1991. It would be merged with Milton Bradly and eventually turn into Hasbro Gaming.

There is so much more to this company than I want to discuss. They made and published board games and video games over the years. I want to talk about the video games they published for the Atari 2600.

A Brief History of Parker Brothers (Very Brief!)

Parker Brothers published and created many popular board games over the years. Some would become video games, but that is a story for another time. A few of the notable games are:

• Monopoly
• Clue
• Risk
• Scrabble
• Sorry!

In the company’s early years, its board games were based on real-life events. It was able to withstand the Great Depression, which caused many entertainment companies to close. Around this time, it released Monopoly, a game that caused many fights on family game nights when I was a kid.

They also released jigsaw puzzles. Parker Brothers made puzzles from the late 1880s to the late 1970s. I never thought about who manufactured puzzles when I was a kid, and I mostly remember Parker Brothers for their board games.

Parker Brothers entered the video game market in the late 1970s, like many other toy and entertainment companies. They briefly entered the toy market with their ROM The Space Knight action figure. In the early 1980s, they started publishing books.

That brings us to their video games. I wanted to look at their Atari games specifically. Let’s see what they have to offer.

Games

Parker Brothers published video games from 1977 to 1996. This period of their history is confusing, as the company merged with and was bought by various companies in the 1980s and 90s before finally being absorbed by Hasbro in a corporate version of Highlander. I won’t be talking about all of that. Let’s look at their time on the Atari instead.

The Parker Brothers library is fascinating. It is what you should expect from a publisher in the early 1980s. It consists mainly of licensed properties, from arcade games to pop culture.

You have games like Spider-Man, Popeye, James Bond, and G.I. Joe that use the name but don’t resemble the source material. In the case of Popeye, the game is a port of an existing arcade game made by Nintendo. The other properties could’ve been named anything. This isn’t a criticism of the games; it is more of a critique of the state of video games at the time. There wasn’t much that developers could do.

I mentioned Nintendo, but Parker Brothers also published games from other companies. Parker Brothers ported Konami, Universal, and Williams’ games to the Atari 2600. Parker Brothers had an internal development team but also worked with other companies, which is typical for more publishers.

• Amidar
• Frogger
• Frogger II: ThreeeDeep!
• G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike
• Gyruss
• James Bond 007
• Montezuma’s Revenge: Starring Panama Joe
• Mr. Do’s Castle
• Popeye
• Q*bert
• Q*bert’s Cubes
• Reactor
• Sky Skipper
• Spider-Man
• Star Wars: The Arcade Game
• Star Wars: Jedi Arena
• Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
• Super Cobra
• Tutankham

I looked up the reviews from the 1980s. Atari Compendium compiled these, and I’m very glad that they are all in one place. The Parker Brothers games received a lot of press, which is great when looking up what people thought at the time, even if reviewers aren’t always a good reflection of the market.

Parker Brothers games received good scores at the time. Frogger received the highest scores, while the Star Wars games got the lowest. However, Spider-Man, Sky Skipper, and Tutankham were very close to the Star Wars games. Some of these games were ranked higher based on how close they were to the arcade game.

The reviews of these games are all over the place, and there are also reviews with no scores. Finding some consensus on these games based on the 1980s reviews is fairly hard. The original concepts seemed to fare poorly, especially if they tried something outside of the norm for the time. The ports of arcade games tended to be received more positively, depending on how close they came to replicating the arcade game.

A few games were never released. Parker Brothers planned to make games based on McDonalds, The Lord of the Rings, and the Incredible Hulk. It also planned on making another Star Wars game for The Return of the Jedi. This would’ve been Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Ewok Adventure.

It is an interesting catalog of games. While some of the games have been relatively maligned in retrospective reviews, Parker Brothers didn’t publish any terrible games. They were all playable, and I could see someone enjoying them, even if I didn’t like some of them.

Spider-Man and Q*bert aren’t all that great. This is my least favorite port of Q*bert. Because of its control scheme, the game always struggles to translate to consoles, and getting the hang of it can take a while.

Parker Brothers was a publisher between 1982 and 1984. They also published games for other systems. After a brief pause, Parker Brothers was bought by Kenner, whom Tonka then bought. This brought Parker Brothers back into video games, as Tonka was the US distributor for the Sega Master System. Once that agreement ended, Parker Brothers briefly left the video game business again.

Pack it up, Game Over

Parker Brothers has a long and fascinating history. It had a relatively brief involvement with video games, but the early years were very interesting. They were similar to Sega in the early 80s.

Both companies acted as publishers for other companies’ arcade games. While Sega could make its own arcade games, Parker Brothers had to license other properties. They did get some well-known arcade games, like Frogger, Popeye, and Q*Bert.

The Parker Brothers arcade ports remind me of the CBS Electronics games. Both companies got what they could and made decent ports of arcade games. They also made some original games that weren’t received well.

With 21 games released, Parker Brothers was one of the more prolific publishers. They didn’t have a game that was received poorly. The worst they had was average, but that isn’t a bad thing. Their games are much better than Games by Apollo, Data Age, and US Games.