The Super Mario Bros. PC port Id 3 donates to the video game museum

There is a parallel universe in which Id Software, known for popularizing the first-person shooter genre, has created PC versions of Nintendo games. In 1990, the studio created a demo for a PC port of Super Mario Bros 3. This demo is now in a literal museum.

the Fort National Game Museum, an institution in Rochester, New York that tells the story of the game and also hosts the Video Game Hall of Fame– recently got a copy of this port, thanks to an anonymous person who uploaded more software.

“The person who donated it was a game developer,” Andrew Borman, the museum’s digital games curator, Told Ars Technica. “It wasn’t something I expected to see in this donation, but it was extremely exciting, having seen the video Romero shared in 2015.” (In 2015, John Romero posted a video on Vimeo detailing some of the demo’s levels and systems. Before that, the port of Id Software Super Mario Bros 3, although a long time part of the game record set, had not been widely seen by the public.)

Carried out over the course of a week, the demo offers a small extract of how Super Mario Bros 3 could have played on a computer. Back in the day, most PC platforms didn’t offer the smooth controls you would associate with games released by Nintendo. Id’s demo did and stood out as a result.

In the end, Nintendo didn’t move forward with the port, but the development effort was not in vain. Borman attributes his development to the spark – and, most importantly, the technology – that led to Commander Keen, a venerable series of platform games released in the early 90s.

Read more: Why some games are in danger of disappearing forever

Video games are a relatively young but rapidly maturing medium, while preservation efforts over the years have not stepped up to match. Physical copies of older games are hard to find and are often expensive to buy (now, apparently, with breathtaking million bucks price tags). Older game publishers don’t always put their games on digital platforms, and those who do will often delete them later. As a result, much of the hard work of preserving video games has fallen into the hands of benevolent hackers and others who use more illicit tactics.

At this time, the Strong Museum does not intend to publicly exhibit the demo, but will make it available to researchers who will deposit an application form.

[H/T Ars Technica]