To keep costs low, its designers sacrificed a lot of features, and Atari programmers always have to work around them. But that's still a huge amount of content for an Atari game.Įven by the personal computing standards of the late 70's, the Atari 2600 was an underpowered machine. 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.Įven with a relatively luxurious 32 kilobytes to play with, Spry could only fit in 16 levels, as opposed to the original Super Mario Bros.'s 32. 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.

And it might have looked something like this. 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. In fact, Nintendo and Atari nearly got into a partnership whereby Atari would distribute the NES in America. 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. 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.

on the Atari 2600? Hey – it could have happened.

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