Doom creator John Romero is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the episodic video game Commander Keen by sharing a PC version demo for Nintendo Entertainment System's (NES) mega-hit Super Mario Bros. 3. id Software's co-founder reportedly pitched the PC platform to the Japanese gaming giant, but it passed on the idea. The programmers' Plan B was to incorporate the demonstration's side-scrolling technology into Commander Keen, which was released on Dec. 14, 1990.
Romero shared the demo video on Vimeo. He also commented that the demo was finished on Sep. 28, 1990, according to IGN.
Id Software programmer John Carmack had developed the high-tech side-scrolling tech for the 1980s PCs, according to Wired. Carmack later created the company's first-person shooting games including Doom and Quake.
After Nintendo gave a negative response about the PC version of Super Mario Bros. 3, all programmers who had helped develop the game demo quit their jobs and launched id Software. They quickly tweaked the tech for the Commander Keen game.
The newly-released Super Mario Maker has made it much easier to create Mario game levels. However, Romero's Vimeo video shows an interesting bit of history about the classic NES game starring the iconic Nintendo character.
In addition, earlier this year Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto admitted that Super Mario Bros. 3 was a play, confirming a video game theory that showed up during the last few years, which argued that hanging blocks and curtains were signs of a stage performance. In September Miyamoto was asked on Nintendo UK Twitter if the old-school NES game was just a "performance." He responded that it was.
Here's the ending for Super Mario Bros. 3: