iD software helped change gaming with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, two of the first major FPS games. But before that, they made side-scrolling action games, and in fact their first game wasn’t Commander Keen, which has its 25th anniversary this week, but a tribute to the Mario series, translated to PC.
Posted by John Romero on Twitter, this was iD’s attempt to bring Nintendo’s smash hit Super Mario Bros. 3 to computers. They built this independently to pitch Nintendo on porting their games to computers, and if Nintendo had taken the company up on that idea, video game history might have been very, very different. That said, you can see why Nintendo passed; the demo, while surprisingly polished in places, is noticeably rough on the mechanics. It’s just not quite as snappy as the springy plumber usually is, and being unable to put the Nintendo Seal of Quality on a game probably left the company cold.
iD recovered quickly; they used the engine they developed for this demo to make their hugely successful Commander Keen series. The money from that, combined with the technology from another release, Catacombs 3D, led to the classic games we know and love. So, perhaps it was for the best. After all, there are only so many goombas you can jump on before you want to fill a cyberdemon with lead.
(Via The Verge)