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The 2600 was no stranger to board game conversions. Versions of checkers, backgammon, Othello, and even Boggle had been attempted over the years with mixed results. However did you know that the 2600 got a port of the blockbuster word game Scrabble? In 1983 Selchow & Righter (the company behind Scrabble) decided that the video game market was hot and they wanted in. But rather than target the world of home computers, S&R decided to bring Scrabble to the humble Atari 2600. Of course some changes would have to made to work within the 2600's limitations and that's where Glib comes in.

The limited amount of cartridge space leads to another problem, there is no dictionary for the computer to compare your word against. If the player wants to put down QZXV as a word the computer will trust that you know what you're doing and take it as a legitimate word. To get around this limitation in two player games the other player must agree to accept each word as you enter it or it will not count (in one player games you're free to cheat to your hearts content). Glib sports five different variations, each with four different difficulty levels. The skill levels only affect the amount of time each player has on their turn (infinite, 132 seconds, 39 seconds, or 24 seconds). The right switch can be used to double the speed of the time bar if the player is wants an even harder challenge (B=Normal, A=Fast). There are also double/triple letter multipliers (indicated by pink or blue bars under a slot) and double/triple word multipliers (the entire bottom rack will turn pink or red).

Billboard - This is your standard mode of play. At the each round all the letters on both the top and bottom racks are cleared out (with a nice little explosion graphic) until all 98 letters have been shown.

Skill Builder - This is the same as Billboard except only the letters on the bottom rack are cleared at the end of a round.

Times Up - In this variation the player tries to make as many words as they can from the letters rather than a single word for points.

Encore - This is probably the most interesting variation. Here the letters 'parade' across the top rock and player must 'catch' (select) each letter and use it before it leaves the edge of the screen. If a letter moves off the edge of the screen it will circle around to the other side.

Over The Edge - This is the same as Encore except once the letters leave the screen they don't come back.

The controls for Glib are pretty intuitive but the placement can be a little tricky for a first timer. The pointer cursor can be moved between the top rack and the bottom by pressing up and down on the joystick. At the start of each round the letters will randomly shuffle, to start the round the player must push the fire button and a random letter will be chosen to be moved to the bottom rack. This may seem a little odd but the letter can be put back after the player selects a second letter and moves it down (this was most likely done because the game will not allow the bottom rack to bet empty). After the initial shuffling, the player places the cursor under the letter on the top rack that they wish to use and presses the fire button. Then the player moves the cursor to the lower rack and selects the position that they wish to place the letter in and presses the fire button again. The letter is then moved from the top rack to the bottom rack and placed appropriately. Letters are always moved down after they are placed so there are no empty spaces in between. The player can then either grab more letters from the top rack or move them around the bottom rack to form words by selecting a letter, moving the cursor to where they wish it to go and pressing the fire button again. Once the player is happy with their word they can move the cursor down to the large 'E' square and press the fire button to end their turn (here is where the second player will have to agree or disagree with the the word). The player can also move to the large 'P' square to pass their turn if there are no possible words to form.

So why is Glib such a rare game? According to Mike Montana (son of programmer Rich Montana) there was a scanline bug that made the game screen unstable on some TVs. The programming documents that Rich had used were actually for PAL systems which have more scanlines available for the programmer due to the nature of how the PAL standard works. This means that the programmer has more time to run code before the beam returns to the top of the screen. If the 2600 is still displaying graphics after the electron beam has returned to the top of the screen the display gets out of sync and begins to roll. The reason this wasn't discovered before it was released is because the timing was technically right on the edge of what would work on an NTSC TV and some sets handled this better than others. Due to this bug retailers started returning all copies of the game and as S&R didn't want to spend more money on making a corrected batch of cartridges the game was quietly buried and written off.