The One Million Club (partial)

These are all the games released for the Atari Video Computer System(VCS)(2600) that sold at least one million copies.  The only possible exception is the game Combat, which was never sold alone in stores, but packaged with the systems, so bit of a technicality there. 

Any who, as you can tell, there were 13 games that sold one million or more cartridges, 6 of which were released by Atari.  Less than half.  That's a major problem because Atari made no money off of the sale of the systems, just the sale of the games.  More specifically, THEIR games, as all the other companies were making games for the 2600 without permission from Atari, and paid no royalties to Atari. 

Laws at the time didn't properly protect Atari from this practice, which is of course highly illegal today, and you could be fined and even jailed for making your own console games without permission.  If you could do it that is, the coding is far more complex that it was back then.  Back then, one person could make a video game start to finish.  Conception, coding, play testing, debugging, engineering for mass production, and sometimes even designing the artwork for the box art.  Today?  It can take a team of 30 or more just to work out the models to be used in a console game.

*EDIT* Some new evidence has surfaced, making this picture inaccurate.  An updated picture is posted here: