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!

We had an Atari and couldn't afford an NES so we bought Mario Bros. on the Atari thinking it was going to be Super Mario Bros on Atari. We kept trying to convince ourselves that we just needed to pass the next level to get to the real game.

My mom always swore she played Donkey Kong on an Atari 2600. I just thought she was misremembering things

"Nintendo's first massive arcade hit, Donkey Kong, was brought to the Atari 2600 by Coleco."

That single sentence already invites corporate drama without even knowing the story beforehand.

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.

Fun fact: the 2600 version of Donkey Kong was technically the first game to allow players to control DK. This is because his chest-pounding animation is produced by flipping his sprite whenever Mario’s sprite is flipped. So just by walking back and forth, you can make DK pound his chest, which also looks like he’s dancing :)

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.

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.

1:36 My opa's college roommate is the man who played Mario in this commercial, and he has starred in many roles in Hollywood since. If you look in the comments of a reposting of the commercial here on YouTube, you should find that he possesses the top comment, and I must mention that I am quite fortunate to have met him once. I believe it is mere coincidence that Coleco was owned by another Jewish family from Connecticut and headquartered in my father's hometown of West Hartford.

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.

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

I remember in 1988 as a little kid everyone was playing Mario on the NES. One of my friends told me he had Mario Brothers on Atari and I didn't believe him, so we went to his house to play it and lo and behold he had it. I couldn't believe my eyes.

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!

As a kid, I thought that the NES was the next Intellivision system, as in Canada, the NES was distributed by Mattel. Maybe you could do an episode on that.

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

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).

14:50 Ahh! When parents told their kids not to play videogames on the good TV. We were stuck with a crappy smaller one. And I had the Atari 5200 back in the day, I loved Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr on it. Goodtimes. But the 5200 controllers broke often.

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

That song used in Atari's Mario Brothers commercial isn't its own song.  It's a parody of the theme song from the TV show "Car 54 Where Are You?"