9 ms·

John Romero Shares PC “Super Mario Bros. 3” Demo Video

154 points by Impossible 11y ago

shadeless 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
- janvdberg 11y ago
  Yes! I did a blog post on it, if you want to know what it is all about (lots of spoilers though): http://piks.nl/wordpress/masters-of-doom/ http://piks.nl/wordpress/masters-of-doom/
  - brianzelip 11y ago
    Off topic, thanks for your post[0] about how your wordpress site got hacked, an interesting read for sure. [0]http://piks.nl/wordpress/how-this-site-got-hacked/ http://piks.nl/wordpress/how-this-site-got-hacked/
BorisMelnik 11y ago
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.
- knodi123 11y ago
  We don't really know he's bad at it. Maybe that was just the last level they had coded, and he needed to be wrapping up. The goal of this demo was not to show off his play skills, but his game design skills. And at the end of the game he showed off being hit multiple times, being killed, and falling in a pit.
- stormbrew 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    oh nevermind then, still interesting
- bionsuba 11y ago
  RTFA
rangibaby 11y ago
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 11y ago
  But we might not have Doom.
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    I can see that, considering Nintendo's puritan stance on violence etc.
    - alricb 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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.
  - trothamel 11y ago
    We might, though. I mean, this code was commercialized as Commander Keen, wasn't it? And the same team then went on to make Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. So there's no reason why this couldn't have been the first item in that sequence of things.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
wmf 11y ago
Is that algorithm documented anywhere?
- shill 11y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh
kriro 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
moonshinefe 11y ago
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.
Nr7 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
MrJagil 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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
__david__ 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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?
  - theinternetman 11y ago
    Plenty of Amiga games had graphics on that level before the 90s though. Considering A500 was 1987
  - __david__ 11y ago
    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=PLx15a59XJMIYo_l8z9RXJPum1dFC0dMUd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcTBrIdkqDE&list=PLx15a59XJM...
- to3m 11y ago
  The Killing Game Show was also released in 1990, and Shadow of the Beast was 1989 :) Also in 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbzioZBTUIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbzioZBTUIU (looks a bit dated now, but I'd never seen anything like it at the time - planar displays make zooming/rotating graphics rather inconvenient)
mrob 11y ago
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.
baby 11y ago
> 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.
- thedaemon 11y ago
  It was a good game but hasn't aged that well. However Commander Keen 4 and on have aged much better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MYPCJ55JME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MYPCJ55JME
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Are you suggesting that Id is much better at creating engines than at creating fully-rounded, fun games? Perish the thought!
- patorjk 11y ago
  This game was a lot of fun back in the early 90s. I'm probably looking at it through rose colored glasses, but I was still able to play it to completion a few years ago when I decided to revisit it. However, I would agree that Mario 3 is the superior game.
- aaronem 11y ago
  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 11y ago
mikejmoffitt 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Also Nintendo likes selling SNESs.

154 points by Impossible 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
janvdberg 11y ago
Yes! I did a blog post on it, if you want to know what it is all about (lots of spoilers though): http://piks.nl/wordpress/masters-of-doom/ http://piks.nl/wordpress/masters-of-doom/
- brianzelip 11y ago
  Off topic, thanks for your post[0] about how your wordpress site got hacked, an interesting read for sure. [0]http://piks.nl/wordpress/how-this-site-got-hacked/ http://piks.nl/wordpress/how-this-site-got-hacked/

BorisMelnik 11y ago

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.

knodi123 11y ago
We don't really know he's bad at it. Maybe that was just the last level they had coded, and he needed to be wrapping up. The goal of this demo was not to show off his play skills, but his game design skills. And at the end of the game he showed off being hit multiple times, being killed, and falling in a pit.
stormbrew 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  oh nevermind then, still interesting
bionsuba 11y ago
RTFA

rangibaby 11y ago

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 11y ago
But we might not have Doom.
- rangibaby 11y ago
  I can see that, considering Nintendo's puritan stance on violence etc.
  - alricb 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
- trothamel 11y ago
  We might, though. I mean, this code was commercialized as Commander Keen, wasn't it? And the same team then went on to make Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. So there's no reason why this couldn't have been the first item in that sequence of things.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

wmf 11y ago

Is that algorithm documented anywhere?

shill 11y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh

kriro 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

moonshinefe 11y ago

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.

Nr7 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

MrJagil 11y ago

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 11y ago
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

__david__ 11y ago

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 11y ago
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?
- theinternetman 11y ago
  Plenty of Amiga games had graphics on that level before the 90s though. Considering A500 was 1987
- __david__ 11y ago
  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=PLx15a59XJMIYo_l8z9RXJPum1dFC0dMUd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcTBrIdkqDE&list=PLx15a59XJM...
to3m 11y ago
The Killing Game Show was also released in 1990, and Shadow of the Beast was 1989 :) Also in 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbzioZBTUIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbzioZBTUIU (looks a bit dated now, but I'd never seen anything like it at the time - planar displays make zooming/rotating graphics rather inconvenient)

mrob 11y ago

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.

baby 11y ago

> 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.

thedaemon 11y ago
It was a good game but hasn't aged that well. However Commander Keen 4 and on have aged much better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MYPCJ55JME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MYPCJ55JME
smacktoward 11y ago
Are you suggesting that Id is much better at creating engines than at creating fully-rounded, fun games? Perish the thought!
patorjk 11y ago
This game was a lot of fun back in the early 90s. I'm probably looking at it through rose colored glasses, but I was still able to play it to completion a few years ago when I decided to revisit it. However, I would agree that Mario 3 is the superior game.
aaronem 11y ago
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 11y ago

mikejmoffitt 11y ago

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 11y ago
Also Nintendo likes selling SNESs.