What Carmack Did at Id Was So Incredible

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John Carmack, one of these geniuses that Yamuchi was identified and talking about, had engineered a way for generic PCs to do side scrolling graphics like the NES. They did a micro-ed software that enabled it and then they famously made a demo version of Super Mario Brothers 3 for the PC and showed it to Nintendo. You can find video, we'll link to it in the show notes. you can find video that came out decades after the fact of the actual demo that Carmack coded up. I think somebody found it on an old machine at some point in time recently.

You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were blown away.

The lovable Disney-like Nintendo that we know today is a 130 year-old a playing card company (i.e. gambling), forged in the shadowy world of the Yakuza and shaped by a four-generation cycle of bitter family betrayal. And its unlikely transformation into a global multi-billion dollar media monopoly was led by an iron-fisted patriarch who — amazingly — never played a video game in his life! Get ready for one of our favorite stories Acquired has ever told — we couldn’t make this one up if we tried!

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