Runner up best 3rd party publisher

[insertclevernamehere]

So I think a while back there was a thread about who's the best 3rd party publisher.  Obviously Activision and Imagic were mentioned the most and I think Parker Bros followed.  Let's just assume the top 3 spots are taken by those 3 and this is about finding the runner up.  My money would be on 20th Century Fox.  Turmoil is a top notch shooter with arguably the best sound of any original 2600 game.  Revenge of the Beefsteak Tomatoes, Worm War I and Spacemaster X-7 are all very good shooters too.  Probably the best Pac Man clone is Alien and Bank Heist is another very solid maze game.  Definitely a few other solid games in their line up which, for me, makes them deserving of fourth place and possibly even more deserving than Parker Bros of third place.

[Lord Innit]

I'm going with Telesys. Good variety in the type of games.  Fast Food, Ram It and Demolition Herby are among my favourite games.  Stargunner, Cosmic Creeps are fun too. I've never played Coconuts but it looks tedious from what I've seen. 

[BONEMAN]

M Network

Adventures of Tron, Burgertime, Kool Aid Man, Astroblast and Frogs n Flies are all great games.

[edladdin]

Gotta throw in some love for Coleco.    DK and DK Jr are much derided, but they were both pretty miraculous back then on the 2600.  As a kid I played tons of Mouse Trap, and Carnival, Venture, and Front Line hold up pretty well.

[Omegamatrix]

Epyx made some pretty good games but not a lot of them. I like 20th Century Fox too. Turmoil, Spacemaster X-7, and the unreleased Meltdown are all good games.

 

 

[+cvga]

2 hours ago, BONEMAN said:

M Network

Adventures of Tron, Burgertime, Kool Aid Man, Astroblast and Frogs n Flies are all great games.

Probably going to also go with MNetwork for the games listed above plus Space Attack (severely underrated), Bump N Jump and the Super Challenge Baseball/Football games. Lots of good stuff.

[toiletunes]

M Network, but honorable mentions to CBS, Sega, and Starpath. Dishonorable mention to Zellers, Panda, and Froggo.

[edladdin]

15 hours ago, toiletunes said:

M Network, but honorable mentions to CBS, Sega, and Starpath. Dishonorable mention to Zellers, Panda, and Froggo.

How did I forget Starpath???   As many hours as I spent playing Phaser Patrol and Dragonstomper...

 

Ok, so the OP challenge was to come up with a "4th place" award, but here's my actual Top 5 ranking of non-Atari publishers:

 

1. Activision

2. Parker Brothers

3. Starpath

4. Imagic

5. Coleco

 

Lots of honorable mentions and great individual titles among the other publishers. 

 

And, of course, AtariAge!  Kind of assumed we were only talking about back-in-the-day action.  If included, AA takes the #2 slot and Coleco gets bumped off my Top 5.

 

[roadrunner]

SEGA