Atarisoft Mario Bros for Commodore 64

2018-02-15

A friend recently found this video of someone playing the Mario Bros for Atarisoft that my friend John Alvarado and I created right out of high school when we were 19 years old.

I'm embarrassed to say at 19 I couldn't figure out how to make the platforms warp when you bonk your head into them given the sprite limits on the C64. Similarly I could not figure out how to make the platforms freeze for some reason. (Of course I could do it now ..... probably )

The problem was the C64, in that mode, is tilemap based so the best I could do is change the 4-6 tiles above your head which wouldn't match where you actually hit your head, at least if I only had one set of tiles. Maybe if I had a set for every other pixel or something but you only get 256 total but assumign we just needed every 4 pixels and 4 frames of animation that would 6 x 4 x 4 or 144 tiles. Some of the tiles are needed for numbers etc. Maybe I should have done that! No idea if I thought of that and was just too lazy or didn't think of it. Of course it would need a few more for the edges and then a different set for the bricks and another set for the ice so maybe it isn't possible. Less positions and less frames maybe. 10 tiles (edges) by 2 frames by 2 positions by 3 tile types is 120 tiles ... I wonder if it would have fit.

Looking at the Ocean version whichd did ship I see their solutions. They don't have any end pieces and the just push up whole tiles. Either 2 or 3.

What else I can add .... I remember being super late on it and getting flown out to Atarisoft to get asked when we'd be done. For some reason I seem to remember we went to some restaurant where I was introduced to fried bananas.

It was a cartridge so IIRC it had to fit in 8k. (Could be confused there). I know Centipede was 8k. Centipede was a port from Atari to C64. The Atari version only used around 6k of the 8k cart so we had room to add animation and a few other things.

Got paid $10k. Still feel guilty about that since it didn't ship. I don't think any of that was shared with John. Sorry John!

Comments below the video for our version seem be pretty positive. They say it plays better than the Ocean version. Of course it helps that both John and I were totally addicted to the arcade version. We'd play together all the time. Such a great co-op game!

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