Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. 3 in the Japanese market on October 23, 1988. The company took more than a year to bring it to American shores, and its arrival sparked the interest of many developers, including a group of individuals named John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero, who created a clone of the game for PC. What started as a joke became a proof of concept and a cornerstone for the Commander Keen saga.
The story tells us that the delay of Super Mario Bros. 3 in reaching the West was caused by a shortage of ROM chips during the year 1988. American players had to wait until February 1990 to get a cartridge, and August 1991 for PAL regions. Ever ready, Nintendo used this gap to its advantage and took up a proposal from Universal Studios to develop the film The Wizard, which, despite being a 90-minute commercial, raised the hype for Super Mario Bros. 3 to impressive levels.
“Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement”
“Fast forward” to September 20, 1990. John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero were then under the wings of Softdisk. Carmack had managed to implement an advanced method that allowed smooth, uninterrupted side-scrolling on PCs, something very complicated for the time. Hall and Carmack left on Romero’s desk a floppy disk with a demo called “Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement”, in which the main character of the Dangerous Dave saga traversed a “pixel-by-pixel” copy of level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. 3. The video below demonstrates that beautiful technology.
The demo was not only a joke; it also showcased the improvements of the new side-scrolling method that Carmack had created. Far from laughing, Romero was absorbed by the demo for three hours and came to the conclusion that it was the key to leaving Softdisk. The rest of the programmers didn’t understand the value of that demo, and the company wasn’t very interested in the technology either, since it didn’t work on CGA systems (it required EGA at minimum).
According to Romero, that same day id Software was born (at least in name), with one more member: Jay Wilbur, project administrator at Softdisk. The next step was to create a proof of concept of Super Mario Bros. 3 compatible with PC. They needed a full week to do it, and finally a copy reached the headquarters in Kyoto, passing first through Nintendo of America.
In a decision that today doesn’t surprise us at all, Nintendo executives said they were impressed by the work but gave it the thumbs down almost immediately: Nintendo’s software had to run on Nintendo hardware. Of course, that didn’t stop the fledgling id Software team, which began development of the Commander Keen saga. In short, a good memory that not only symbolizes the birth of a historic company, but also the potential of computers imitating (and later surpassing) consoles.
