TITLE
The birth of id Software
AUTHOR
John Romero
PUBLICATION
The Verge
YEAR
2023
ARTICLE TYPE
Book Excerpt
FROM THE ARTICLE
I hit the spacebar and got the shock of my life.A familiar video game lit up my PC screen. I was looking at a replica of Super Mario Bros. 3: the billowing white cloud characters, the green shrubs, the construction blocks, and rotating gold coins. But Super Mario didn’t exist on the PC, because the technology that powered it didn’t exist on the PC. It existed only on the Nintendo Entertainment System and a couple of the ’80s’ best computers, the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64. These systems had the custom chips to handle two-dimensional side-scrolling. PC games, due to a dearth of graphics support and processing power, had been restricted to static screen games and chunky scrolling — until Carmack created smooth vertical scrolling just a few days earlier with Slordax.
Now I looked at Super Mario Bros.’ Mushroom Kingdom and wondered what it was doing on my PC screen. I also noticed Dangerous Dave standing at the bottom of the screen. The character I created two years earlier who was inspired by Super Mario Bros. was now inhabiting the Mushroom Kingdom. I laughed. That was the copyright violation of the title, but how far did this parody go?
I hit the arrow key to move Dangerous Dave and find out.
What I saw destroyed me.
GAMES MENTIONED
Super Mario Bros. 3
PEOPLE MENTIONED
John Carmack
Tom Hall
EXCERPTED FROM
Doom Guy: Life in First Person