This is a demo of IFD's (soon to be id Software) Super Mario 3 demo created for Nintendo on the PC. The demo was completed on September 28, 1990. We worked on this demo for a week, after work, and on the weekend all two days. It was all from scratch, except we used the scrolling code from the Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement demo made a couple days before we started on this.
We sent this demo to Nintendo of America, they in turn sent it to Kyoto to the mothership office, and the execs there saw the demo and were really impressed. However, they didn't want their intellectual property on anything but their own hardware, so they told us Good Job and You Can't Do This.
So, we immediately started work on the first Commander Keen trilogy, Invasion of the Vorticons at the end of September. Two and a half months later and we shipped it on December 14, 1990.
After this tech advancement came these:
September-December 1990: First id Software engine (Keen 1-3) - idTech 1
March, 1991: First id Software 3D engine (Hovertank One) - idTech 2
May 1991: Keen Dreams engine (used for Keen 4-6) - idTech 3
November 1991: First id Software texture mapping 3D engine (Catacomb 3D) - idTech 4
January-May 1992: Second id Software texture mapping 3D engine (Wolfenstein 3D) - idTech 5
January-December 1993: Third id Software 3D engine (DOOM) - idTech 6
January 1995-June 1996: Fourth id Software 3D engine (Quake) - idTech 7
The current idTech numbering system doesn't make sense when you look at all the technology we made.