It feels weirdly subversive these days to play Mario Bros., a Nintendo game, on Atari hardware.

Though most Atari 2600 games don’t have a title screen, Mario Bros. does; this adds to that weird feeling of playing it, as it features the names Atari and Nintendo on the same screen.

It’s always been a bit of an oddity, seeing as Nintendo’s 8-bit NES would arrive just a few years later and absolutely dominate the video game landscape in America, following the video game crash that Atari had a big hand in causing.

For many owners of the Atari 2600, new or otherwise, getting hold of Mario Bros. is seen as a bit of a badge of honour.

Is it any good though?

A port of the arcade pseudo-sequel/spin-off of Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. sees the titular siblings, Mario and Luigi, cast as plumbers for the very first time, trying to clear collections of weird critters out from the sewers.

In practice, it’s a single screen platformer, in which you must hit the creatures from the platform underneath, then knock them out by touching them before they wake up again.

Fireballs must also be avoided, coins collected and there’s also a special block with limited uses that you can hit to knock everything over at once.

Clear out enough creatures (with some taking more hits than others) and you’ll move to the next stage, with a bonus, coin collecting stage available at certain points too.

Though suffering from the same problem as any non-exclusive 2600 title these days, in that you can often find and play a vastly superior version of this title fairly easily, it’s genuinely impressive to see just how the programmers managed to squeeze Mario Bros. onto an Atari cartridge.

Control is a bit slow, stiff and awkward, however, and you’ll often lose the game due to struggling with jumping the right way (and usually from the rather over exuberant fireballs, rather than enemies), but once you’re used to its quirks, the game does have a certain, odd charm.

It’s not great, though; it’s definitely fun to have as an object of curiosity, and something to show incredulous friends, but it really isn’t a particularly good game.

Enemies look fine, for the most part, as do the titular brothers themselves; however, the game even struggles to make coins look like recognisable objects, let alone all of the other moving parts it features.

The Atari 2600 port of Donkey Kong feels like a much better game despite its own issues and restrictions, but Mario Bros. is, in its own way, a much bigger conversation piece when added to your collection.

It is cool that it has a two player mode, however, which is definitely something it has over Donkey Kong.

So would I recommend Mario Bros.? Not really, but perhaps paradoxically, I’m glad I have it.

There’s far better Atari 2600 titles to have, but there’s no denying the allure of owning an Atari cartridge with Mario and Luigi on the cover, even if the game itself is a bit too ambitious and falls short on its gameplay.