The company's first release was the database File Manager 800, written by Grant and Wolosenko, followed by the game Dodge Racer, a clone of Sega's Head On programmed by Rob Re.

Additional well-received releases followed, including Rainbow Walker, Blue Max, and The Pharaoh's Curse, and some others based on unusual concepts, like Necromancer and Alley Cat.

First-person game Dimension X was promoted for its "altered perspective scrolling" technology, then released in a cut-down form over nine months later to disappointing reviews.

These include Necromancer, Rainbow Walker, Blue Max, Fort Apocalypse, Alley Cat, and The Pharaoh's Curse.

Many of Synapse's games made their way to the UK as part of the initial wave of U.S. Gold-distributed imports (under the "Synsoft" imprint).

Synapse was an early developer for the unsuccessful graphics-accelerated Mindset computer project and created the first-person game Vyper (1984) for it.

Salmon Run, the first game from Necromancer and Alley Cat designer Bill Williams, was published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1982; Synapse released a VIC-20 port under the "Showcase Software" label the following year.

Although it is for their success with arcade-style games that it is primarily remembered, Synapse started out selling database software for the Atari 8-bit computers.

Synapse was developing a series of home productivity and financial applications: SynFile+ (written in Forth by Steve Ahlstrom and Dan Moore of The 4th Works),[citation needed] SynCalc, Synfilet, SynChron, SynComm, SynStock, and SynTrend.

[6] Some time before their demise, Synapse had started work on interactive fiction games (or as they called them, "Electronic Novels").

When Jack Tramiel purchased Atari's consumer division from Warner Communications, he refused to pay for the 40,000 units of software that had been shipped.