Three Atari 2600 consoles (+games) rescued from the trash!

I went out thrifting today, and as I was dropping off some donations, I noticed a bin with some old clothes and a few Atari 2600 cartridges peeking out. I mentioned to one of the volunteers how uncommon it was to see retro games at thrift stores these days, and they let me know that the entire bin was destined for the trash! In their defense, the games were pretty crusty. Covered in dirt, grime, dust, and cobwebs, as if they'd spent the last 40 years or so in a shed with a leaky roof, or maybe buried underground.

"Free" was a price I could agree with, so I went digging, and there were three Atari consoles in there too! A four-switch 2600 (from around 1980), a 2600 Jr. (released 1986), and an Atari Flashback (probably from around 2004). There were also a bunch of controllers, and altogether, 30 unique games (there were two copies of E.T. The Extraterrestrial... clearly the previous owner had taste).

The power adapters are all in rough shape; two of them held together with electrical tape, but I decided to give one a try while I wait for a replacement to arrive in the mail. I used isopropyl alcohol to clean some corrosion off of the connectors, and made a makeshift RCA-coaxial adapter using alligator clips (the 2600 outputs RF over an RCA plug).

Surprisingly, the thing just worked!! Most of the games I've tried so far work as well, with a few that'll probably bounce back after a detailed cleaning.

I've always been aware of the Atari library, but never spent much one-on-one time with it (we were always a Nintendo house growing up). My take so far is that there's a lot of fun to be had here, but many of the games are cryptic and alien.

Without the manuals they shipped with, they're like primitive cave paintings, and figuring out what the ancients were trying to convey is half of the (new) fun.

Do you have any favorite Atari games? Are there any hidden gems in my collection? And most importantly, do you have any ideas for a fun Atari 2600 homebrew game?