Public Commander Keen Forum

1990 demo was rejected by Nintendo but led to id's own Commander Keen.

Part of what made the demo special was a John Carmack-coded scrolling algorithm that went way beyond the stuttering background movements and full-screen wipes you'd usually see in late '80s DOS games. "When looking at PC games of the era, there really weren't titles with the smooth scrolling seen in Nintendo’s hits," Museum of Play Digital Games Curator Andrew Borman told Ars via email. And though Nintendo would never entertain the idea of a PC port for SMB3, id Software was "not deterred by the rejection, [and] the technology was reused for Commander Keen, which is still one of my favorite series of that era," Borman said.

I'm not sure who gave it to them, but it wasn't from me. Not that I would have been against it. Glad to see it's out there.

Awesome!

The museum sent me a list of the filenames, and it's a bit interesting to look at this as a mid-point between Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement and Keen.

It looks — from the filenames — to be closer to DDiCI: it's still using the EGAPICS format, rather than the EGAHEAD/EGALATCH/EGASPRIT format Keen uses, but interestingly there seems to be a separate tileset and extension (.WLD) for the world map. I wonder what it was that made them merge them (and just use level 80) for Keen. There's also a left-over preferences file for Deluxepaint.

In any case, here's the list of filenames:

I wonder who donated the disk. Someone of Apogee?

Romero wrote: ↑Thu Jul 15, 2021 8:43 I'm not sure who gave it to them, but it wasn't from me. Not that I would have been against it. Glad to see it's out there.

Wait, is this John Romero himself?

Wow I didn't even see that. That whole thing about new users' posts being invisible and then not giving notifications sometimes.

Anyway, glad this stuff is being preserved, even if it seems to be somewhat restricted access for the time being. Hopefully the same can be done for the TUiT tech demo someday.

This is what the Super Mario Bros. 3 Demo Disk looks like:

https://twitter.com/mikerubits/status/1 ... 4554576898

Unsurprisingly, this sort of 2d gameplay style have been reused and reinvoked by a plentiful count of 2d game engine,
throughout the recent half-century.
Reminescent of a paradigm for resource renewal; and the sharing, distribution, & advancement of technology.
I fully anticipate the 20s will be: if not a resurgance or revival of 2d games, then at the least;
I expect to see some form of brilliance coming about from a result of the 2d games in this current decade of the 20s.

However, unrealistic to think that a developer releasing hardware and software simultaneously,
would be willing to over-reach by publishing a port of its software to the hardware of a competing developer.
Ascertainably, that's a statement on the importance of not over-reaching.
I'm shocked the article lacks details about the interconnective evolutionary lineage chain of 2d game engines, wholelistically.