A year earlier, John Carmack and John Romero had built, from the ground-up, a PC port of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 3, at the time a remarkable feat given PCs weren't supposed to be able to handle side-scrolling like a console could. Initially a crude demo using characters from a Romero game built for Softdisk called Dangerous Dave, (and which they christened Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement) the guys eventually had Mario looking so good, and so faithful to the original, they contacted Nintendo about licensing the game from the Japanese company for release on the PC.
While Nintendo of course turned the offer down instantly, another party had become secretly interested in the team's work. With games like Dangerous Dave attracting a cult following, a representative from publisher Apogee began writing to Romero under the guise of a fan, so as not to alert Softdisk, as he had every intention of luring the guys away to make their own games for a living using the concept of shareware, which would see part of a game given away for free to tempt people to pay for the whole thing.
Tempted by this offer, and capitalising upon the platforming technology they'd built for the Mario demo, the team whipped up a side-scroller called Commander Keen, released in December 1990, which quickly became a hit. Keen was a small boy transported into a science-fiction saga, armed with a trusty laser pistol and defended by an oversized...Green Bay Packers helmet.
