Doom Creator Shares Super Mario 3 PC Demo From 1990

Super Mario Maker has been out for about 3 months now, which means all kinds of people have been making their own levels. But what if I told you that one of the first custom Mario levels made by a non-Nintendo employee was made 25 years ago? And what if I told you that the people making it went on to make Doom? It's true, and we've got the video to prove it.

Back before Doom revolutionized the way we played shooters, there were a group of guys with big dreams of making video games. They had a company that they called Ideas from the Deep. Eventually they would change the name to id Software and release Doom, and Commander Keen. But before that, they made a port of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the PC. The team made it specifically for Nintendo, perhaps to test the waters and see if the PC was a viable platform for Nintendo games. Check it out below.

The port obviously doesn't play exactly like the NES version, with the gravity being a little wonky, and some of the graphics being off. However, you have to be impressed by what the team was able to do with the game on a PC. And bear in mind that they had to build the entire engine from scratch, as there were no emulators to rely on back when they were making this.

So why let this video see the light of day? Well, the ground work that went into this eventually branched off to be Commander Keen, and today marks the 25th anniversary of its release. Developer John Romero decided that this was the perfect way to celebrate it.