/vr/ - Retro Games

I read an article recently about how John Carmack (of ID fame) was a pioneer in smooth scrolling PC games, and his breakthrough was the game engine which allowed "NES quality" action games to play on the IBM PC. As a proof of concept he re-created mario 3's first level on a PC in 1990. He tried to sell this to nintendo and while they admitted they were impressed, they wanted to keep mario excluisve to their console. This paved the way to Carmacks first hit game (commander keen) and the formation of ID software. PC world in 1992 celebrated the commander keen games as bringing this style of action game to the PC. The keen engine was licensed and otehr companies used it to make "Nintendo style" fast scrolling action games on the PC.

Am I missing something here? I grew up playing a lot of action games (with scrolling) on both the C64 and later the 286/386 at home. I played thexder almost a half decade before I bothered to play a keen game. Thexder had nice vertical and side scrolling for its time with it's "transformers meets metroid" gameplay. Speaking of transformers, the 1985 transformers game on C64 also had very fast scrolling.

I remember when commander keen came out and being entirely unimpressed, although admittedly I was both a PC and NES gamer. How was it a technical marvel for it's day?