I'm curious how Road Runner came to be on the Atari 2600. Ostensibly the game is a port of the Atari Games arcade game, but there are a lot of little bits that don't add up. Atari Games is not mentioned anywhere in the game or its packaging, unlike KLAX, where Atari Games is credited as the source. Road Runner has an incredibly low catalog number for a 1989 game, CX2663. That's lower than all other red-labeled games and even lower than most silver labels (catalog number is not a strict measure of release date, of course, but in the red-label era it's a pretty safe correlation). Then there is the 1984 prototype that predates the official release by five years, and even predates the Atari Games arcade game.
Here's my theory: Atari Inc. acquired a license for the Road Runner in the early '80s, at the same time they were picking up licenses for other cartoon characters, perhaps in a single deal that also netted them Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil. Since Atari was a Warner company at that point, those would have been some of the easiest characters to go after, relatively speaking. Road Runner was then slated for release in the new children's line, like Bugs Bunny. That would explain the 1984 prototype, though it wouldn't necessarily explain the catalog number, lower even than the children's games that did see release. RealSports Baseball got CX2640, though, so it wouldn't have been the first time Atari filled a "hole" in their catalog left over from the black-label era. Then, the crash came, all children's titles not yet released were cancelled, and Atari split in two. Atari Games inherited or renegotiated the license for Road Runner, and decided the ideas developed so far would make for a good arcade game. Atari Corp. meanwhile also hung onto the license, or also renegotiated. Then, after the success of Atari Games's arcade game, and with Atari Corp. looking for titles to keep the 2600 on store shelves, they dusted off that old prototype, added some embellishments to make it a little more like the arcade game, and shipped it off. That would explain the lack of credit given to Atari Games, if Atari Corp. felt the pre-split work was sufficient to allow them to call the game their own. They did something similar with Atari 7800 Choplifter, where the graphics look a lot like Sega's arcade game, but Sega isn't credited because the game-play is adapted only from the original Broderbund game.
Make sense? More importantly, is it true? Anyone happen to have knowledge one way or another?