Here’s an interesting bit of 90s gaming history, shared by John Romero in honour of Commander Keen’s 25th anniversary. What does a PC demo of Super Mario Bros. 3 have to do with Commander Keen, you may ask? The technology developed for the former was used on the latter.
Nintendo ultimately turned down the soon-to-be-ID-Software’s Super Mario Bros. 3, presumably as they had no intention of expanding into the PC market. Although, looking at this video, Mario’s haunting, all-black eyes might also have put them off a bit.
Credit to NeoGaf for spotting this timely tweet.
Happy 25th Birthday, Commander Keen! In honor I'm sharing a video of our SMB3 demo we made for Nintendo on 9/28/1990.https://t.co/R2GlSYCoBM
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Still, it’s a pretty fascinating, early-90s convergence of two absolute powerhouses of games development (in their different ways): ID and Nintendo.
Plus we got Commander Keen out of it in the end, so it all worked out.
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