Mario Bros

Publisher: Nintendo

Designer: Shigeru Miyamoto, Gunpei Yokoi

Type: Platform

Platform: Atari 2600

Release Date: 1983

Rating:

Yeah, I really had to comment on how bad the Atari 2600 games really looked, especially since it does happen to be an 8-bit machine, and the games that appeared on other 8 bit machines (cough, c64, cough) were so much better looking. Still, I guess we are still looking at the really early days of the video game era so, well, I guess we can’t expect too much to come from these home machines.

Yet, this game certainly is nothing that you would expect to come from the Mario franchise. All you seem to do is to kill nasties and not even that. There are like three platforms and some nasties appear on them (as well as other rather, well, blocky, objects that I have no idea what they are supposed to be, but they didn’t kill me so I guess that is alright) and you have to knock them off the platforms by jumping into them from underneath, and then jumping onto the platform and kicking them off.

Actually, I do vaguely remember these old handhold games that we would get when we were kids (or should I say other kids would get because my parents never saw the point in forking out money for such things – so was the deprived childhood that I had – and I will point to the fact that that phrase is dripping with sarcasm) and this game was among them. I’m not going to go into details of these games because, well, I’m talking about Mario Bros from the Atari 2600.

Look, the game wasn’t bad, graphics aside, and it wasn’t too hard either. However, I certainly would be expecting anything on the level of other games from the period though, although this was a very, very popular machine.

Anyway, I can refer you to the Wikipedia article for more information on the game, and you can also go to a site called Moby Games, which also has a bit of a write up.