John Romero Shares PC “Super Mario Bros. 3” Demo Video | Hacker News Reader

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

gamasutra.com

154 pointsImpossible54 comments

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.

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.

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

"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.

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/

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/

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.

> 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

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.

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

Are you suggesting that Id is much better at creating engines than at creating fully-rounded, fun games?

Perish the thought!

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.

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.

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.

Nintendo has a lot of clever hacks that Keen doesn't use: e.g., the 'trees' are also the 'clouds'. The 'victory' music is the Mario theme backwards. I suspect (Carmack and Romero are on here, and can totally correct me) that Keen has little music and plain grey backgrounds to fit into memory without resorting to those kinds of hacks.

What? The cloud tile re-use is from the first game, and no part of any Mario game plays back the melody backwards to generate the victory music. The victory music is a distinct musical track.

> What?

Just ask for a citation or state a correction. No need to be rude.

> The cloud tile re-use is from the first game

That's correct, it's used in earlier games, it's not from SMB 3. The point about Nintendo doing hacks for efficiency purposes still stands.

> no part of any Mario game plays back the melody backwards to generate the victory music.

I've seen a video somewhere recently that showed how sound affects were re-used - some of the re-use went unnoticed for over 20 years. Trying to find it now.

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

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

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?

Plenty of Amiga games had graphics on that level before the 90s though.

Considering A500 was 1987

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

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

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 (looks a bit dated now, but I'd never seen anything like it at the time - planar displays make zooming/rotating graphics rather inconvenient)

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...

But we might not have Doom.

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

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

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.

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.

Was it guaranteed in any way? I don't recall a lot of smash PC hits around this time, and most of the ones that were big were games that weren't really console-esque anyway. Most of the successful ones were strategy games.

It wasn't until hardware and insane innovation came together with Doom that consoles had a very real competitor in "action" video games. (perhaps Wolfenstein and its ilk could qualify, I remember it being big but never really registering as "mature" the way console games did)

This demo is, to me, extremely impressive because it's close to the NES version. But it also has all the hallmarks of PC attempts at platformers. It never "felt" right. The reasons are explained a bit here, but there were ultimately a lot of limitations that made it very hard to compete even graphically with commonly-available hardware.

A few years after this demo, Jazz Jackrabbit [0] (1994) was a huge hit, I believe. Mario could have been successful as well.

Though by releasing Mario on the PC, might have cost Nintendo console marketshare. I do think people by Nintendo consoles often because of the games / game characters like Mario, Zelda, etc...

---

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b16upFloYak

Sure, but there was "PC huge hit" and "console huge hit" and they were light years away in terms of metrics.

Best I can tell Jazz Jackrabbit did not sell 1MM copies, SMB3 sold 17MM. Doom ended up selling something like 3MM, but the key difference was it was an experience that didn't exist much on consoles, and Carmack & Co. did everything possible to make it futuristic compared to anything then possible on PC.

I just don't see an SMB copy doing anything noteworthy at that stage, and the end result probably would have stunk, too. But that was a limitation with the platform more than anything.

Jazz Jackrabbit is another interesting example of the tech difference between the two consoles. That YouTube video is running on a Soundblaster. PCs had superior storage and a lot of processor power compared to the consoles, so Jazz had incredible music compared to consoles because it could use modfiles, basically CPU-synthesized music using arbitrary wave files as instruments, played through the Soundblaster (used as a generic digital sound out, which may not sound impressive, but the consoles didn't have that yet, it still just had various cheap synthesis chips and a smidge of wavetable capability not sufficient to play dynamically-generated sounds). The PS1 was not quite out yet, so the current (popular, people I know actually owned them) gen was basically Genesis and Super Nintendo. Neither could pull that off. Graphically, Jazz had more colors to work with.

But mechanically, Jazz at best had parity and at worst would have been considered a low-tier platformer at best on the Super Nintendo.

I honestly don't know what it was with PC platformers of the era, if they were actually incapable of "feeling good" for some technical reason or if nobody ever, well, for lack of a nicer way of putting it, did it right. But they were always bizarrely floaty and had poor physics and feel. Whether or not the PC hardware could have competed on platformers, I do not ever recall playing one that felt as good as a console game did.

I'm not sure what you mean by smash hits, but the Sierra adventure games were massively popular (for PC games) from the mid 80s-90s. Prince of Persia was a platformer, and the PC version was released in 1990.

The Keen games were successful enough, and within a year (late 1991) had graphics and gameplay that were what I would consider SNES-like.

Being able to play Mario on a PC would've been a killer app for sure. The popularity of emulators since the mid-late 90s should be enough proof for that.

Obviously RTS and FPS turned out to be the defining genres of PC gaming because of the tight controls, netplay, and being able to take advantage of Moore's law, but I think Nintendo missed out on a good chance to expand their business.

My point is none of those games approached the sales of even modestly popular console games. And emulators aren't a fair comparison because they exactly replicate the game as it existed in console. Anytime crossovers like this were made up through the late 90s, they were always a shell of their console counterparts.

> massively popular (for PC games)

And there's the problem. "Massively popular for PC games", at the time, would equate to "a serious flop for a first-party console game". People would buy an NES so their kids could play a popular game. Almost nobody who didn't already have one would buy a PC for similar reasons. And anyone who already had a PC almost certainly already had a console as well, so there'd be no meaningful additional market in PC ports. Nintendo had every reason in the world to make the decision they did, and none whatsoever to do otherwise.

> graphics and gameplay that were what I would consider SNES-like

You might, but no one else would. The Keen series's graphics are better than the NES could manage until very late into its lifecycle if at all, but they're certainly not up to what the SNES could do, even without the Mode 7 coprocessor.

It's not like it was random chance that Nintendo turned them down. Having control of their own hardware has been a core part of their strategy for a long time.

Probably not. I doubt Nintendo would have impressed by the level of piracy on the PC back in the day. Besides, Nintendo made and still makes money on hardware, so that would have been a terrible business plan.

Nintendo actually did have some games on Japanese PC platforms [1] [2] [3], converted by Hudson Soft (better known for Bomberman and Adventure Island). However, they were significantly downgraded from their NES counterparts.

[1] Super Mario Bros. Special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txcEMPakkPg

[2] Golf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPSHI-1j1ZU

[3] Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, Excitebike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV-kZ_wPx-Y

There was even Mario for Apple 2 !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV_iYmk1Sn4

That particular game was available on dos too. It is hardly smb, though. Just the same characters.

It's not meant to be Super Mario Brothers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros.

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.

Also Nintendo likes selling SNESs.

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.

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.

They actually OK'd Super Mario Special, which is even worse: 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.

Is that algorithm documented anywhere?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh

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 :)

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.

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/ is a good source for it, but every mario game ever has been speedrun and it's easy found on youtube.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

oh nevermind then, still interesting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com