Super Mario Bros. on the Atari 2600? Hey – it could have happened.
The game that made Nintendo a household word is well-known as the exclusive killer app for its Nintendo Entertainment System hardware, which took over the American videogame industry in 1985 and pushed Atari into the history books. But before Nintendo got into the hardware biz, versions of its games, like Donkey Kong and the original Mario Bros., were made for Atari’s then-popular hardware. In fact, Nintendo and Atari nearly got into a partnership whereby Atari would distribute the NES in America.
If Nintendo and Atari’s love connection hadn’t shattered, we might have seen a version of Shigeru Miyamoto’s masterpiece ported down to the significantly less capable 2600. And it might have looked something like this. Chris Spry, an animator from Portland, Oregon, recently completed Princess Rescue, an attempt to create a Mario-style game that runs on the 1977 Atari hardware. His efforts have resulted in a game filled with a surprising amount of the features from the original, and it’s quite fun to play.
Spry says he was inspired by another “demake,” a version of the game Mega Man running on the Atari platform.
“I thought it was pretty cool — wow, somebody could make a Mega Man game for the Atari; that’s really neat,” he told Wired via phone. “If somebody can do that, why can’t they do a Super Mario game? I thought, why not give it a shot?”
In putting together his recreation, Spry had access to some tools that Atari’s original programmers did not. A tool called Batari BASIC lets a would-be programmer use the well-known and simpler BASIC language to generate a 2600 program, as opposed to the more obscure and difficult Assembly language. And while contemporaneous Atari programs had to fit into ROM chips that were around four kilobytes in size because of the cost of the memory, that’s no longer an issue in 2013.
“It’s 32K in size, which by today’s standards is really tiny,” Spry says. “But back in the day, that was a lot.” In fact, Atari only ever released a single game with a 32K program size – Fatal Run, released in 1990, 13 years after the Atari 2600 came to market.