Month of Mario: Mario Bros. (Atari 2600)

While I have already taken a look at the original arcade release of Mario Bros., I couldn’t help but be curious about the strange case of a Mario game releasing on a console that wasn’t made by Nintendo. Before the NES and Famicom lead to Nintendo locking down their beloved video game hero to pretty much only appearing on their systems, their early arcade hits had no real reason not to receive ports to the home consoles of the time. Thus, Mario and his brother Luigi ended up on an Atari console, but their little platforming game about clearing out a pest infestation was apparently a bit too much for the system, leading to something that plays far sloppier than the original arcade game.

If you pop open the manual for Mario Bros. on Atari 2600 to learn what the game’s about, you already get a bit of an oddity when it describes the game’s simple premise. While Mario Bros. is known for introducing the idea that the Mario brothers are plumbers, here it seems Atari wasn’t ready for Mario to move on from his carpenter work that he was involved in at the time of the original Donkey Kong arcade game. So, to justify why Mario and Luigi are in what appears to be a sewer clearing out an unusual infestation, this work takes on a more personal slant, the pipes specifically in Mario and Luigi’s home as it’s under attack by turtles, flies, and crabs. That does make the fact the game will continue producing new rounds infinitely until you run out of lives a bit more sad for the brothers, this not just work clearing out city sewers but instead an unwinnable battle just to have safe use of their own shower again.

Much of Mario Bros. on Atari 2600 does sound a lot like its arcade counterpart on paper despite an incredible decrease in the fidelity of the graphics. Mario and Luigi are both available for play, the game offering two-player where you can try to compete for more points or just work together to see how far you get. During a round, creatures will start coming out of the top pipe in a four-tiered playfield, touching them causing an instant death. To make them vulnerable, you need to bash the ground they walk on from below, upending them so you can safely leap up and kick them away. For a creature like the Shellcreeper, the simple turtle is taken out with that quick method, although since every enemy can right themselves if you wait too long to kick them away, the Shellcreeper has an unusual advantage where its sprite meant to show it’s working to get up looks like it’s standing up already. You’ll get used to the confusing appearance of the creature and learn it isn’t just getting up almost immediately, but other creatures are a bit more complicated. A Fighterfly hops along, meaning you need to bonk it from below at the right time or it will avoid your attack. The Sidesteppers are the only foe you will really need to worry about when it comes out of the pipes though, the crabs taking two hits to upend but also gaining a speed boost after the first hit. The problem with Sidesteppers is that speed up can make them so fast your character can’t keep up, instead having to head down a layer or two and wait and hope the creature will come your way. While most of the time they will walk off the edge of a platform and march along, Mario Bros. on Atari 2600 also allows them to decide to reverse course, meaning sometimes you can set things up for an attack only to watch them about-face and upset your efforts.

Slipice will appear from pipes from time to time later in the game as well, these living icicles not necessary to clear in order to finish a level but they will freeze a platform if left unattended. Already the Mario brothers have some pretty poor controls, their jump stiff and your leaps needing to be lined up just so or else you’ll watch half their body clip through the platform you looked like you were going to land on. The ice usually makes your character take an additional step when you try to come to a stop, but the movement effect is a simple price to pay for the accidental benefit Slipice give to your enemy management. Mario Bros. on Atari 2600 can’t display too many enemies and dangers at once, meaning if Slipice are on screen, that means a more dangerous enemy like a sped up Sidestepper can find itself entering a pipe and not able to reappear until you’ve cleared out the other foes. This does mean the game never reaches incredible levels of chaos as there’s a set amount of objects that can even be displayed, meaning often you can take some time to set up enemy kills rather than worrying about being overwhelmed. When you defeat one of the enemy types necessary for clearing a round, something the game calls a wafer pops out of a pipe because it knows it can’t pretend the boxy shape that changes color based on nearby elements can’t be passed off as the coin it’s replacing from the original game. This can be grabbed for some points towards your score, but its presence also means that the game can’t put more enemies on screen, thinning the difficulty a bit more.

However, there is still one major element that takes Mario Bros. and instead makes it far too difficult for its own good. Periodically, a fireball will appear in one of the four layers and float across the screen. The fireball is faster than Mario and Luigi, meaning if you’re in a bad spot when it appears, you’re cooked. You can earn extra lives at certain score thresholds, but ultimately, the thing that will end up killing you most of the time will be some failed scramble to escape a fireball you couldn’t anticipate. In the arcade and other ports, fireballs would bounce a little or take some time to clearly form, meaning you can get out of the way before it’s too late. You can’t even bonk a fireball from below because it sails cleanly through the air, meaning the brothers can’t bail each other out of a rough spot with a well timed attack. As an Atari 2600 game though, Mario Bros. does offer a range of difficulty options, 8 game variations existing that tinker with certain elements. Even numbered variations feature two player play and depending on the variation you can start with 3 or 5 lives, but the most meaningful alterations come in modes 3, 4, 7, and 8. In these there are no fireballs whatsoever, but they instead expose an interesting fact about this version of Mario Bros.: without fireballs, the game is phenomenally boring.

Fireballs are the only unpredictable threat that leads to the player being pushed out of an effective comfort zone in Mario Bros. on Atari 2600. Even when the Sidesteppers get their speed boosts, you’ll always have time to see where they’re heading, and if they do change their mind about leaping off a platform, you still have time to change your own course since they need to walk the entire length of the platform before they can get another chance at dropping down a layer. There is no timer so really no reason to risk approaching an enemy you think is going to get back up, but perhaps the most damaging element of this specific port is that the enemy limit means without fireballs the game simply can’t display enough creatures to put the pressure on you. You’re not going to get caught in a bind because the game can’t muster up enough enemies to close in on you from either side. Stay careful and a layer below the threats and you’re fine, especially since heading to the far left or right will lead to you appearing on the other side in a wraparound that makes walking even the bottom layer perfectly safe since enemies will enter the bottom pipes rather than keeping up a chase. This does mean disabling fireballs pretty much leads to such an easy version of Mario Bros. where the main obstacle to success is your boredom, but turning them on leaves you open to the occasional out of the blue roasting as you don’t have time to avoid the whims of the fireballs.

There are a few other small elements in Mario Bros. on Atari 2600 worth mentioning, the game not quite able to render a POW Block so instead a yellow rectangle exists on the bottom layer that you can bash to harm every grounded enemy on screen. It has three uses before it can’t do more and is refreshed every ten rounds, it perhaps best used for maybe getting those super speedy Sidesteppers if you don’t want to set up the second hit. It’s not really a vital tool due to the low difficulty but not harmful in its presence, the occasional bonus round also harmless and at least a chance to rack up points. Bonus rounds, as the manual proudly declares, do feature something recognizable as a coin, the coins floating in the air meant to be collected in a tight time limit to contribute to your point total. They are a fairly basic break from the formula and much harder than they’re meant to be thanks to the stiff controls, this more just a brief break before you’re back to bopping baddies from below. Even knocking out enemies doesn’t provide much satisfaction though, mostly because they upend so abruptly and without the neat momentum drift from the arcade where you can set them up to fall towards you for a quick clean kill. Instead, everything present is a hollow imitation that doesn’t quite work right, it feeling more like the designers only looked at Mario Bros. being played in the arcade rather than getting hands-on and finding out what made that incarnation a decent play.

THE VERDICT: Mario Bros. for Atari 2600 only really puts up a fight if you enable the fireballs, and your continued success when they’re around is pretty much contingent on luck. They’re not overwhelmingly present and they do require you to sometimes abandon your plans or perhaps run into danger, but their random nature does not pair well with their movement speed, meaning most your lives are lost to poor luck. Disable them and the game pretty much has no way to keep you from pressing on and wiping out its enemies, Mario Bros. not able to display enough enemies at once to lead to hectic chaos but also not providing anything besides fireballs that can actively threaten you.

And so, I give Mario Bros. for Atari 2600…

A TERRIBLE rating. When a game starring Mario is teetering on the edge of Atrocious, you know something has gone awry. Put simply, the fireballs are the problem whether they’re present or not, the game hinging too much on the threat they pose. When they are around, there are definitely moments where it outright feels unfair as they spawn in a spot that dooms you, but this doesn’t mean you will get screwed over before you’ve even made much progress in the game. Other times, they do their job if still rather poorly, their speed a bit too high but it is definitely necessary to have something that can make you slip up since nothing else present really does. Once you understand the stiff controls of your jump and realize how Sidesteppers will act once hit, you’ve eliminated the other sources of potential deaths, meaning the variations without any fireballs really can’t provide you anything beyond an endless mindless crawl to see how many points you can earn before you decide to do something better with your time. The variations with fireballs would benefit from the fireballs being more fair, perhaps even lingering a little longer as they form so they can still be speedy threats but remove those moments where you’re doomed no matter what you do. Of course, the bigger problem is that the game hinges so much on them. Enemies need to be more potent if they’re not going to be able to share the screen together. Make them move erratically when things get tough, like perhaps an enemy not leaving the bottom area too readily so you can’t use it as a safe zone so often. Slipice shouldn’t be so abundant that they keep crowding out actual creatures, and the wafers, despite playing into the scoring, might be better off gone or limited to only appear if there is an intentional break in the enemy presence. As it is, Mario Bros. is mostly about running from fireballs because they’re the only thing that can effectively upset your efforts so long as you pay attention to the play field.

If the fireballs were a little more unfair or, conversely, too easily avoided, that could definitely lead to Mario Bros. for Atari 2600 being a lost cause. The game didn’t nail the sweet spot with its only hazard with any teeth though, leading to frustrations rather than compelling resistance. Strange as it is to see Mario and Luigi on a console belonging to an eventual business rival of Nintendo’s, the novelty doesn’t really help that this porting effort took an arcade game with its own issues and only made it worse.