
John Romero Shares PC “Super Mario Bros. 3” Demo Video - Impossible
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/261822/John_Romero_shares_PC_Super_Mario_Bros_3_demo_vid.php
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shadeless
Wow, I imagined this only as couple of screens plus game mechanics, it's way
more impressive than that.

It seems appropriate to bring up Masters of Doom here - I would recommend
reading it if you are at all interested in Carmack, Romero, gamedev,
programming, startups... so basically all HN users. It's a great book.

~~~
narrator
Masters of Doom is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. I don't think
there's really a book out there that follows the life and exploits of a great
programmer like Carmack in so much detail.

~~~
unixhero
I highly recommend the book as well. I consumed it by audiobook while driving.
A great experience.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuU_ure7tF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuU_ure7tF4)

"The computer, it contained worlds."

Which is incidentally the exact same thing I have been saying to people when
asked why I was so into computers as a kid.

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mrob
Note that this demo ran at 35fps (intended for a 70Hz CRT), but the videos are
30fps or 60fps, and 35 is not an integer multiple of 30 or 60. This means the
frame timing in the video is uneven (even before playback timing problems).
Motion quality isn't as good as the 60fps original game, but it's not as bad
as it looks in the video.

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baby
> Nintendo declined the partership, and the project was reborn as an original
> title -- Commander Keen -- which debuted 25 years ago today.

Looked it up:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyTDI2ATb6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyTDI2ATb6k)

is it just me or it seems to be light years behind super mario bros 3? In term
of fluidity, fun, graphics, level design... I haven't played it but it looks
like it wouldn't stands well nowadays while the former is still playable and
enjoyable.

~~~
aaronem
It's not just you. The Keen games were fun, but I'd always prefer to play
Mario as a kid. I wouldn't be all that surprised to learn that part of the
reason Nintendo declined the partnership offer was because id's SMB3 engine
wasn't actually very faithful to the original game -- for all that its jump
timing and ground friction are quirky and occasionally weird, they are also
very distinctive, and it's obvious from the video that id either didn't
understand that or didn't understand why it was important.

~~~
Narishma
All that could easily be fixed and was mostly a result of the rushed job and
them not having access to source material to work with. I think the only
reason Nintendo declined is because they didn't want Nintendo games on non-
Nintendo systems.

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__david__
It's a very impressive demo, but it's also a testimony to the sad state of PC
graphics (and sound) hardware back in the day. Consider that _years_ earlier I
was playing stuff like this[1] and this[2] on my home computer.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLZoYUgilkI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLZoYUgilkI)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-U6HUaAONI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-U6HUaAONI)

~~~
1wd
The demo is from 1990. According to wikipedia the Amiga games you linked were
released in 1990 and 1989. How did you play them _years_ earlier?

~~~
__david__
Fair enough, there were plenty of nice looking Amiga games from earlier. How
about Menace[1] and Baal[2] (I loved Psygnosis)?

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXBpMCVicic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXBpMCVicic)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcTBrIdkqDE&list=PLx15a59XJM...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcTBrIdkqDE&list=PLx15a59XJMIYo_l8z9RXJPum1dFC0dMUd)

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rangibaby
If Nintendo had accepted it, and it was a massive hit like it was guaranteed
to be (come on), we might have official versions of Pokemon and Smash Brothers
on the PC now. When a butterfly flaps its wings in Tibet...

~~~
jvolkman
But we might not have Doom.

~~~
rangibaby
I can see that, considering Nintendo's puritan stance on violence etc.

~~~
alricb
It's true that Nintendo had a puritan attitude, but I would note Doom was
ported to the SNES, with blood, gore and inverted crosses; the port was
released in September 1995:
[http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Super_NES](http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Super_NES)

~~~
rangibaby
The SNES had a pretty bad history of censorship, eg. Mortal Kombat and
Wolfenstein 3D, which were both playable but kind of pointless (no blood and
censored fatalities in MK, no blood, dogs, or Nazi symbols in Wolfenstein).
They relented somewhat after the introduction of ESRB ratings in 1994.

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mikejmoffitt
It's fascinating to see this thing for the first time, but now it is
understandable why Nintendo was not interested.

It is a good demo to show that (relatively) smooth scrolling can be achieved
on such a low-end machine not designed for gaming, but as far as gameplay goes
the resemblance to the Mario series stops below the surface. The physics that
make the Super Mario Brothers games simultaneously unique, fun and challenging
are more specifically defined than "2D Newtonian jump physics and you can jump
on guys".

In addition, some of the background graphics are very well done conversions
(clearly done by just looking at the original without actual access to the
data) while the character sprites are surprisingly messy. What's going on with
Mario's face? You'd think the Mario sprites would be the most important aspect
of the presentation!

I don't want to be overly critical of something like this and it's really
great to finally get a look at it, but it clearly took a lot of time so it's
just odd to see certain details overlooked in what was to be a proposal demo
to a big company like Nintendo.

~~~
nailer
Also Nintendo likes selling SNESs.

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moonshinefe
Seems quite far off from the NES version's quality and game physics. I realize
it was just a demo though, pretty cool video clip of gaming history. Who knows
what could have been if Nintendo supported PC for their games.

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Nr7
It's interesting that Nintendo shot this down but later ok'd crappy games like
Mario is Missing on the PC. This looks like it could have been a lot of fun
with a little polish.

~~~
gergles
They actually OK'd Super Mario Special, which is even worse:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0HQOKmAPRA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0HQOKmAPRA).
However, this was 1986, so I'm assuming that they felt burned by the PC
platform after that trainwreck and so didn't really entertain id's offer.

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wmf
Is that algorithm documented anywhere?

~~~
shill
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh)

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kriro
The Keen series was pretty solid. CK 4 is one of the better games I remember
playing on the PC back in the day. I only played CK1 and CK4 as those were the
free ones in the shareware model iirc, maybe I should revisit the series :)

~~~
PvsNP_ZA
Keen is available on Steam nowadays for not too expensive (I think $5).

Keen Dreams is excluded from the bundle IIRC, but that's abandonware by now
and has been opensourced on Github.

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MrJagil
Tangentially related I would recommend everyone to check out some Speed runs
of the mario games. It is astonishing what people pull of, hacking in it's
purest sense.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/](https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/) is a
good source for it, but every mario game ever has been speedrun and it's easy
found on youtube.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Some tool-assisted "speedruns" now have significantly more elements of
hacking, in that they involve analyzing the game code to find bugs, predict
random number generators, or look for exploits. For instance:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uep1H_NvZS0#t=32m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uep1H_NvZS0#t=32m)

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BorisMelnik
Amazing! Wow very cool seeing the sprites / screens that inspired the real
game. I would play this game for hours, days at a time. I skipped so much
school playing this game. One of my god friends almost got expelled from
skipping so much school for this game.

Edit: kind of funny how bad the player was at this game. If you ff to the end
of the game he can barely make it from block to block and dies 3 times in the
span of 200px.

~~~
stormbrew
> Wow very cool seeing the sprites / screens that inspired the real game.

Wait, what? Are you under the impression that this demo inspired Mario 3 in
some way?

The controls look awkward and floaty, so I doubt skill has much to do with it.
It's a fairly superficial copy of Mario 3 without the attention to detail in
making sure the controls are both fun and really precise. Which, to be fair,
in 1990 only Nintendo and Sega could pull off with much finesse (others were
good at one or the other, but not so much both). Jumps like that were only fun
in Mario games because of that balance.

~~~
BorisMelnik
oh nevermind then, still interesting

