The National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas announced on social media recently that it had discovered graphics for a never-before-seen Atari 2600 title, in a batch of floppy disks belonging to the ex-Atari artist Jerome Domurat.
Domurat, in case you're unfamiliar, was an artist that worked at Atari between 1981 to 1986, and is best known for his collaborations with the developer Howard Scott Warshaw on games like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T., and for his work alongside the programmer Steve Woita on a licensed game based on the Looney Tunes' character Taz.
In addition to the Atari 2600, he would also be involved in creating graphics for other hardware Atari during his career in gaming, including the Atari 5200 and Atari ST, and would go on to become a creative director at Sega Multimedia in the early '90s, where he worked on the first-person adventure game Jurassic Park for the Sega CD. He later passed away in 2016, with some of his old materials eventually finding their way over to the archival team at the National Videogame Museum, for preservation purposes.
As the museum states, the graphics come from a disc labelled "Earthquake" and appear to be pieces of a possible earthquake-themed game.
Writing on Facebook, a spokesperson for the museum said about the discovery, "These graphic images seem to show many of the elements of a possible earthquake type game - buildings, debris and a fireman.
"One particular graphic screen appears to show a fireman in a Berzerk type maze looking for injured people with a flashlight that illuminates a portion of the screen, similar to the effect used in Haunted House. It would seem that if this much work was put into the graphics, that there should be some mention of this game but to the best of our knowledge, no such game has ever appeared on any development lists."
The museum has stated it will continue their research, and will provide an update if they manage uncover more about the history of the game.