The game also saw a release on MS-DOS using the original Wolf3D engine.
id Software promptly sold the engines to Wisdom Tree, making Super 3D Noah’s Ark the only unlicensed Super Nintendo game to see a commercial release. The Super Nintendo would receive security data from the donor cart, and then Super 3D Noah’s Ark would piggyback that security handshake into memory and begin execution. The cart would be a pass-through design that would require an “official” SNES donor cart in order to operate. id was well aware that Nintendo did not allow religious content of any kind in their games, but they realized Wisdom Tree was in earnest when the Christian games developer revealed their plans to release the game without a license from Nintendo. Shortly thereafter, id Software’s business manager received a request from Wisdom Tree to license out the Wolf3D engine – including the Super Nintendo version – for a game involving Noah’s Ark. However, the later success of Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny prompted Nintendo to offer a $100,000 contract to id Software if they would port Wolfenstein 3D to the Super Nintendo, albeit with much of the violence and Nazi imagery censored. Nintendo turned them down, claiming that they were not interested in entering the PC market.
To emphasize this point, Carmack and Romero put together a demo that recreated the first level of Super Mario Bros.
It was a fantastic coding feat that brought PCs to a world of graphics tech that had been dominated by consoles such as Nintendo’s NES. When id Software was still just a dream called “Ideas of the Deep” and its founders were still employed at Softdisk, John Carmack developed a technique to do smooth 2D scrolling on PCs.