Enduro

Basically, this is Sega's Turbo on a budget. Not my fault it's the better game, though ;)

The seemingly minor features of Enduro are what really set it apart. In this game you race a traditional time limit, but it is cleverly disguised as a single daily cycle, where your environments change, and you pull an all-day and all-nighter every level, as the sky changes accordingly. The objective of every level is to cut across a number of cars, starting with 200 for the first level. The changing of the day and night is as atmospheric an effect you can get for an Atari 2600 game, and the changing in scenery does a banging job in directing your stratagems elsewhere: Visibility is greatly reduced in the morning mist for example, so you'll surely want to slow down and cruise instead of leaping blindly.

And that's the whole other thing that just makes this game so miraculous and almost zen-like: It is in fact a perfectly viable strategy to drive slowly and just cruise, because the controls are so tight and fine-tuned that you'd never get ahead of yourself. Even if you're not aiming for a frustrating match where you need to defeat the objective, the game is perfectly winnable by just driving at a barely fast, pleasurable speed, making this, despite its cliched genre, one of the more inspired and relaxed Atari 2600 experiences.