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Late one night in September 1990, John Carmack was up working late (at Softdisk) on his new side-scrolling EGA engine and was joined by Tom Hall. They wanted to do something to show John Romero and blow him away, so Tom looked over at the Nintendo that was running Super Mario Bros. 3 and said, "You know, we could make the first level of SM3!" Carmack said, "Okay, let's do it" and so they commenced to spend the next 6 hours or so banging out the graphics, game map and programming for a little demo Tom titled Dangerous Dave in "Copyright Infringement" (meaning that they ripped off SM3, so it was copyright infringement!) So Tom didn't have to draw all the walking and jumping frames of a Mario character, he just took my Dangerous Dave graphics (from the PC EGA version) to speed along the process. Romero was excited when he saw it as this would lead to the first smooth side-scrolling game for the PC and the Commander Keen games. It would also lead to them later creating their own company id Software which became a huge hit with the Doom & Quake franchises. This demo game was never released commercially. |
