If you were a kid in the early eighties, you probably spent your Saturday mornings blowing into dusty plastic cartridges and praying the screen didn’t flicker. Most of those games were common stuff. Combat. Pac-Man. ET—the one that ended up in a landfill. But there is one game that basically became the Bigfoot of the retro world. Red Sea Crossing on the Atari 2600. For decades, people didn't even think it was real. They thought it was a myth, a joke, or just a misremembered fever dream from a magazine ad.
It wasn't a myth. It’s a very real, very weird piece of software.
Finding one of these today is like finding a winning lottery ticket in a stack of old newspapers. Honestly, it’s one of the rarest video games ever manufactured. We aren't talking about "rare" like a shiny Pokémon card. We are talking about a game where only two physical copies were known to exist for the longest time. It’s a holy grail.
What Actually Is Red Sea Crossing?
The game is simple. You play as Moses. Your goal is to get across the Red Sea while avoiding obstacles like sharks and giant clams. Yeah, sharks. Because apparently, the biblical exodus needed a bit more arcade-style peril to keep kids engaged in 1983.
It’s a single-screen affair, typical for the Atari 2600’s limited hardware. You move vertically. You dodge things. You reach the other side. That’s the loop. Steve Stack developed the game, and it was released through a company called Inspirational Video Concepts. They weren't exactly Activision. They didn't have a massive marketing budget or a distribution deal with Toys "R" Us. Instead, they took out a few small ads in religious magazines.
That’s where the trouble started. Or rather, where the mystery began. Because the game was sold via mail order only, it never hit retail shelves. It just... vanished.
The graphics are primitive, even by 1983 standards. You’ve got a blocky Moses and a sea that looks like flickering blue stripes. But the rarity isn't about the gameplay. It’s about the scarcity. For nearly thirty years, the gaming community at large had never seen a copy. No box art. No manual. Just a grainy black-and-white advertisement in the back of a 1983 issue of Christianity Today.
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The Discovery That Changed Everything
In 2007, a guy named Jerry Greiner bought a stack of Atari games at a garage sale for next to nothing. Among the common titles was a cartridge with a handwritten label. It just said "Red Sea Crossing." He didn't think much of it until he started poking around online forums like AtariAge.
The collectors went nuts.
Suddenly, the "myth" was sitting on a coffee table in Ohio. This single find proved that the mail-order campaign actually resulted in shipped products. Before Jerry's find, the game was essentially a ghost story. Then, in 2012, another copy surfaced at an auction. That one sold for over $10,000. For a piece of plastic that holds a game you can beat in about ninety seconds, that is a staggering amount of money.
Why Does This Game Command Such High Prices?
It’s all about the supply-demand curve being completely broken. Most rare Atari games, like Air Raid or Birthday Mania, have some level of "known" history. Red Sea Crossing stayed hidden longer than almost anything else.
The game was intended to be part of a series of "Bible-based" games. It was a niche market. Back then, "religious gaming" wasn't really a genre; it was an experiment. Steve Stack, the programmer, actually surfaced years later to talk about it. He confirmed that they produced about 100 copies. Think about that. Only 100. In the world of mass-produced consumer electronics, 100 units is basically zero.
Most of those copies are likely sitting in trash heaps or at the bottom of a "miscellaneous" bin in someone's attic. People didn't keep these things. If you bought this for your kid in 1983, they probably played it for ten minutes, got bored because it wasn't Pitfall!, and threw it in the closet.
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A Technical Look at the Cartridge
The hardware itself is fascinatingly "lo-fi." Unlike the polished labels from Atari or Parker Brothers, Red Sea Crossing looks like something someone made in their basement—because, in a way, they did.
- The label is often a simple white sticker with basic text.
- The ROM size is tiny, fitting the standard 2K or 4K format of the era.
- The programming uses "flicker" techniques to show more sprites on screen than the Atari 2600 was technically supposed to handle.
It’s a miracle the game works at all. When you boot it up, the sound is a series of beeps that vaguely represent a triumphal march. It’s charming, in a very 8-bit, "I’m trying my best" sort of way.
The Cultural Impact of the Religious Gaming Boom
In the early 80s, there was this weird push to make video games "wholesome." Parents were terrified that arcades were dens of iniquity. Naturally, developers tried to capitalize on this by creating games that felt safe for Sunday school. Red Sea Crossing was the pioneer of this movement, even if it failed commercially.
It paved the way for companies like Wisdom Tree (the people who made Bible Adventures for the NES). Wisdom Tree was famous for not being licensed by Nintendo, so they made their cartridges a weird baby-blue color to bypass the lockout chip. But Red Sea Crossing did it first. It proved there was a direct-to-consumer path for niche content.
Even though the game is obscure, it represents a specific moment in tech history where anyone with a dev kit and an ad in a magazine could try to change the world. It was the "indie dev" scene before that was even a term.
Misconceptions and Rumors
You’ll hear people say there are thousands of copies hidden in a warehouse. There aren't.
You’ll hear people say the game was banned by the church. It wasn't.
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The reality is much more boring: it was a business failure. The company didn't sell enough copies to justify a second production run. They went out of business, the tapes were lost, and the digital files (source code) vanished. What we have left are the physical artifacts.
There’s also a rumor that a "box" exists for the game. To date, no confirmed original box has ever been found and verified by the community. Every copy found so far has been "loose." If a confirmed, mint-condition box ever shows up, the price of the game would probably double overnight.
How to Spot a Fake
Because of the high price tag, the market is flooded with "reproduction" carts. People take a cheap copy of Combat, wipe the EPROM, and slap a Red Sea Crossing label on it.
If you see one at a flea market for $20, it’s a fake. 100%.
The real deal has specific circuit board signatures and aging on the plastic that is very hard to forge perfectly. Most collectors use high-resolution scans of the internal boards to verify authenticity. Honestly, don't buy one unless it has been vetted by a reputable auction house or a known expert in the AtariAge community.
Actionable Steps for Collectors and Fans
If you're interested in the history or owning a piece of this, don't go out and try to find an original unless you have five figures to burn. Here is what you should actually do:
- Play the ROM: You can find the Red Sea Crossing ROM online for use with emulators like Stella. It’s legal for educational purposes if you’re just looking to see what the gameplay was like. It takes two minutes to set up.
- Check Your Attic: Seriously. If your parents or grandparents lived in the Midwest in the early 80s and were into mail-order religious materials, check the old toy bins. Look for cartridges with plain white labels.
- Research Steve Stack: Read his rare interviews. They provide an incredible look into the "Wild West" days of game development where one guy could code an entire project in a few weeks.
- Visit Gaming Museums: Occasionally, copies are loaned to museums like the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas. Seeing it in person is much cooler than looking at a blurry JPEG.
- Follow the Auctions: Keep an eye on Heritage Auctions or specialized retro gaming sites. Even if you aren't bidding, watching these sales tells you a lot about the health of the collectibles market.
The story of the Red Sea Crossing Atari game is a reminder that history isn't just about the big winners like Mario. Sometimes, it’s about the small, weird, and forgotten projects that slipped through the cracks. It's about a 100-copy run of a Moses simulator that became the most sought-after relic in a billion-dollar industry.