Doom Developer Shows Super Mario Bros. 3 Demo for PC from 1990

Doom and Commander Keen developer John Romero has posted a video online showing a 1990 demo of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the computer. Romero uploaded the video to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the game Commander Keen.

Romero gives It was a demo his studio Ideas from the Deep made in 1990 to show Nintendo what Super Mario Bros 3. would look like on PC. The graphics of the demo were not as nice as in the original Super Mario Bros. 3, and the controls weren’t that smooth either, but the demo shows that the desire to bring Nintendo games to PC has been around for a long time.

Nintendo clearly didn’t take up the offer to bring the game to PC. Ideas from the Deep was later renamed id Software and has become known for games such as Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake and Commander Keen. The studio is currently working on a new Doom for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The will to play the games on something other than the original Nintendo consoles still exists. GameCube and Wii games are being made playable on PC thanks to the Dolphin emulator, and the Wii U emulation is also being worked on. In October, the Wii U emulator Cemu was only just able to show the menu of Mario Kart 8, now a new video shows the game as somewhat playable.

The quality of the game that the Cemu delivers is far from comparable to the quality of the Wii U itself. For example, the graphics are less, the game runs much slower and audio is not yet available. The difference between the old and new version of the emulator is significant and shows that maybe in the future the Wii U games can be played on PC.