Shove It! (lost build of cancelled CBS Atari 2600 game; existence unconfirmed; 1983)

A logo that CBS used in 1983.

Status: Existence Unconfirmed

CBS Electronics was the video game division of CBS Toys/Gabriel Industries that was founded in 1982 by CBS Inc. to get into the video game market. In the US, they are known for releasing several ports of games for the Atari 2600, and 5200 systems as well as a few originals. Outside of the US, they are known for distributing some of Coleco's games as well as the Colecovision itself. Around 1983, CBS decided to move out of the video game industry, pulling the plug on their video game decision, and sticking to regular television.

One of several games allegedly being produced for the Atari 2600 was Shove It!, a game that was being programmed late in the division's life. The only time the game has ever been mentioned is on the Atari 2600 Rumor Mill page where the user of the site got a message from Bob Curtiss about the game. This is what he had to say for the matter:

"Shove It! was my original concept for a two-player 2600 game that used two 2600 systems., each with their own TV of course. The idea was that someone would take their 2600 over to a friend's house to play this game with them. A bit far-fetched at the time, but to CBS' credit they were open to these kinds of ideas. The game was simple - there were 9 rectangular objects, sort of like long pieces of wood or metal, displayed in a 3D view, that you could "push" or "shove" away from you, and they would move toward the other player on their screen. They in turn could shove them back toward you. The two 2600's communicated via serial data transfer with a serial cable connected to one joystick port on each machine. Did you ever imagine that you could send data from one 2600 to another via the joystick ports? You'd use the joystick plugged in to the 2nd joystick port to select which object you wanted to shove toward the other player, and the push the button to shove it. I had a functioning prototype working within 3 months."

Otherwise, there is no known information about the game anywhere on the internet, and there doesn't seem to be any source about this at all, meaning that Bob might have made the whole thing up, especially considering how ambitious of a concept it was for such a system. It's possible that the game was made, but only ended up being a prototype. It's currently unknown as to what happened to that prototype, if it ever existed at all. It's also possible that this was an April Fools joke that the person operating the AtariProtos site never realized, missing the fact that it was a joke.