When Nintendo Games Were on Atari

Hello everyone! This is a special video because it is the first episode written by someone outside of the Gaming Historian household. Ethan Johnson did a fantastic job and it was fun to collaborate on a project. More to come!

I begged for Atari Mario Bros for my 8th birthday, circa 85. I got it.. and I really loved it. I knew it wasnt gonna be arcade perfect but it was everything I needed it to be. A year later in 86 I saw VS Super Mario Bros. in the arcade, and my world changed... I worked for 9 months to buy an NES just because I had to own it. Playing SMB on the NES was a religious experience.. having played Nintendo games on Atari for so long, the experience of the NES was euphoric.

This video is vindication 33+ yrs in the making. When I was a kid, we had my uncle's old Atari 2600 & I knew I saw the Mario game, but no video game departments in the stores (Toys R Us, Child's World, Sears, KayBee, etc) believed me and thought Mario was only on Nintnedo. This was between 88 & 89. The Atari died in late 89 and I finally got a NES for my 6th birthday in 90.

My friend and I stayed up for hours one night trying to see how far we could get on Mario Bros. He got to level 76. It was insane.

I'm friends with Donkey Kong programmer Garry Kitchen, and it just turns my stomach that there's this persistent rumor that Donkey Kong 2600 was made deliberately bad to make Colecovision look better. It's not true. He had a matter of weeks to take the game from concept to plastic. Weeks. This isn't the 2020s where you can crank out a game during a GameJam because you have tool kits and engines and pre-built assets to browse. He had to code it from scratch and make it look and play like a game that ran on one of the most intensive processors in arcades. He did a workman's job on it, and I don't think Donkey Kong 2600 is THAT BAD, especially compared to games like Atari's Pac-Man, which similarly had a nightmarish development time (though that was more of "this prototype is good enough. Send it to manufacturing"). I think that he should be proud of the work he did. It's Donkey Kong-ish enough for the time he had.

I've just recently stumbled across this channel and already binged it a fair amount. I love the old stuff too. You feel the passion.

I love that you revolved an episode around Atari. Definitely a part of gaming history that sort of gets swept under the rug by the mainstream these days. I'm sure a lot of the younger viewers here learned a lot!

I was planning on covering Nintendo games on Atari, but I did NOT know Sky Skipper was ported over! Great video as always.

I love how video game history has basically taught me everything I know about business. It's unconventional learning like this that makes something I would normally hate much more enjoyable, so cheers to that!

When summoning salt AND gaming historian upload in the same week, you know its a good week.

i was born in 88 and my first console was a snes and i already feel like a relic. i'm 34 now and never played an nes until years later. atari was a word still kinda thrown around, as i remember my grandmother refering to my console as "yeah, his atari thing or whatever". also just think about how we came from a few pixel blocks to a ps5. crazy.

OMG I LOVED that Mario Bros commercial back in the day, using the old theme from the Show "Car 54, Where Are You" with rewritten lyrics. I used to sing the commercial's jingle and my parents would just look at me like I grew a foot out of my skull. Good times.

This is one of the channels that will stand the test of time. I always have time for the gaming historian.

Can confirm, I had "Mario Bros." on the 5200. It was good, until the jump buttons on the joystick broke, rendering it unplayable (only the lower of the side buttons served as a jump button, for some bizarre reason, and both lower side buttons on both joysticks ended up breaking).

amazing to see the difference in graphics between the arcades and consoles during that period. I 'm amazed that people bought the console versions at all! I guess it goes to show that all the obsession with graphics will always be secondary to gameplay

The 2600 version of Mario Bros was great fun. I loved that game. I remember thinking “When is SMB going to come to the 2600 or 7800?” It wasn’t unreasonable to suppose since the 2600 and 7800 had DK, DKjr and Mario Bros. I finally realized it wasn’t happening and bought a NES in winter of ‘88. Regular kids didn’t know about the concept of licensing back then.

I love hearing about Atari stuff, it's fascinating to see devs do their best with relatively primitive hardware. Fantastic work on the video!

I had Mario Bros & Donkey Kong Jr for the Atari 2600. Man both bring back memories. A great one!

One thing I love about this vid is it reminded me about the 7800 versions of a few of those original Nintendo ports. If memory serves, they re-released more arcade accurate looking versions of a number of older 2600 titles - the Mario Bros and the Donkey Kong games being some of the ones I own. Thanks to folks dumping their older tech off on my family when they upgraded to an NES, I actually ended up with both the old and "new" ports. It's neat to see both how far they came from those original versions and that I, too, enjoyed playing Mario game on my Atari all those years ago (and every so often nowadays). = )

Possibly fun fact: the song from the Mario Bros commercial is a re-write of the theme song for Car 54 Where Are You, a buddy-cop comedy series that aired on NBC in the late 50s-early 60s.