Does anyone want to develop for Atari? I do.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Atari mostly does in-house development of the games themselves where their consoles are concerned? I think it’s the case for most of the games released on the 2600.
Seeing as activision was founded to develop for Atari this is wrong.
As a Brit I also miss the Sinclair spectrum and the 16bit computers of atariST (boo) and commodore Amiga (hurrah) but as it is made in Australia, understandable they were overlooked.
There’s also Atari Lynx, Atari Jaguar, etc that had plenty of developers. If you’re interested in the Olden Days of video games, there’s always Gamebiz 2 to try(freeware), or 3(costs money but is easier to approach and IMO better balance wise). They’re very heavy games, though, so you might not like them if you don’t like “working” to play. 
(They’re also much more abstract in a sense than GDT, but also specific in the machines and their qualities(it includes stuff like Amstrad CPC, Atari 7800, VIC-20, and their specs are different and thus different to make games for. Not nearly as casual as GDT is, but if you’re truly interested in the area, really good games IMO)
As for third party games for the 2600, wikipedia lists a huge load of third party games, and mentions that Pitfall!(one of the most popular 2600 games) was a third party game(Activision), so it seems that even 2600 had third party developers and even publishers at some point. More so for Lynx and Jaguar. But really, they’re not consoles that are that known to the general public who might play GDT(who have played Vena and Ninvento games in their youth, or perhaps G64(though Amiga might be a meaningful addition) ;)), and the way the game works, having more competing consoles wouldn’t truly add much, it’d just bog the window with more consoles you’ll never develop for(late game Pads and such, never touched them). Although with the multi-platform ability, it might still work(though isn’t that a late game feature too?)
The game is set in the 1980’s, after the video game crash of 1983. The Atari 2600 was made in the 1970’s and was over saturated with so many bad games that people wouldn’t buy video games anymore in fear of getting one that was terrible.
So, I don’t think the Atari 2600 would be in the game but maybe the Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar could be in the game.
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I think it’d be great to see some earlier systems. It would also help the game go on longer cause man… I just wanna play the thing FOREVER
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I think a common desire is for the game to go longer. Seems like starting it earlier would help.
There were definitely 3rd party developers and they reached across several different platforms: Atari 2600, Odyssey 2, Intellivision, Coleco, Atari 5200 - then there was the explosion of various home computers.
People talk about the crash like it was the end of gaming when really it was the end of a small slice. There were plenty of people spending money on home computers and computer games in 1983 & 84 - it would just take a story balloon to explain why the market has shrunk down to only a few choices.
Oh and the Atari 7800, Jag, and Lynx were nice, but I’ve never really missed them as part of GDT. The kind of business you are running in the early parts of this game would have stayed far away from those systems. However, if it started earlier . . . .