Commander Keen: 13 Years Later

16977 writes "I just noticed that Id Software is now selling downloadable versions of its classic titles Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons and Goodbye Galaxy. Although the game is over 10 years old by now, there is still a thriving community of Keen fans out there whose interest has not waned. We now have level editors for both Keen Vorticons and Goodbye Galaxy, unofficial Keen fan software, and of course the infamous Dopefish, which has by now made cameo appearances in well over a dozen computer games. However, we have yet to see Commander Keen: The Universe is Toast, the sequel to the previous Keen game that was planned but never made. With the original developers pursuing their own independent projects, it doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon. But in the meantime, die-hard Keen fans have been getting by, not unlike Farscape fans after their show was cancelled."

Comments

And he's still only a commander...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't he be promoted by now?

Doom II

[Knacklappen]

Well, the best Commander Keen reference IMHO was the secret Wolfenstein level in Doom II: They even had the secret WOLF level (within the secret D2 level) and behind the last door there was: Commander Keen hanging from the roof. You had to shoot the poor fellow to get to the next level...

Good, But...

[menasius]

I agree, this is really great. I used to love to play the Keens as well as many other games. And there are many times I've slammed down a new graphically pretty peice of trash and wished I had a classic.

The problem is companies don't want to release most of their old games because times have changed and so have operating systems. With the terrible legacy DOS support in XP for things like games you are almost forced to run them emulated in linux (dosemu, etc..). Also, no matter how much companies say "we have no support line for this, use at your own risk" you'll always get contacts asking about this and that.

In reality, these games need to be released to a team of volunteer developers when they are no longer economically valuable to the Company. Then that team can update as the times change if there is still an underground following.

OR, the obvious choice which was discussed in an earlier topics is to start making games that are fun again as opposed to yet another graphically gorgeous First-person-run-through-the-hallway-with-a-rocket -launcher-conveniently-located-at-chest-level. Not that all FPS are bad but look at the numbers... its like hitting a dust mite with a musket.

-bart

Fido Freq

[Alioth]

I remember downloading the shareware version (a massive 600K!) of Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy via FidoNet freq (file request). You could file request files from other BBSes, and they'd be sent to your BBS (I ran 2:252/204 at the time). I had endless fun playing Commander Keen in a DesqView DOS session whilst the BBS ran in the other DOS session on my amazing 16MHz 80386 computer with 2.5MB of RAM!

The Dopefish for some reason reminded me of Sir Les Patterson, the Australian minister of Culture :-)

Re:Fido Freq

[Alioth]

Remember this was 12 or 13 years ago. At that point, that 386 was the proverbial dog's bollocks - sort of the equivalent of my current 2GHz Pentium machine. And it was reasonable for its day when running DesqView as a multitasker.

I did ultimately end up running Linux on that machine (in summer 1992) and even then, it was fairly painful (partly due to the nature of Linux back then, but mostly due to the crappyness of the machine, it was an *early* 386 and the chip had bugs. I couldn't do kernel compiles on it (the compiler would segfault on any big files), but I could do enough compiling to learn C on that machine).

In 1993, I upgraded that machine to a 486 with 16MB of RAM...and...a SOUNDCARD! That was enough to run X with olvwm very well. I always used to show off about how it didn't need to swap during kernel compiles. Heaven :-]

The Dopefish

[arevos]

God, I hated that Dopefish. Probably the single most terrible creature in the Commander Keen universe, bar none. Not even the Vorticons had anything on this green aquatic moron. My very dreams were haunted by that fish as I paddled in vain to keep ahead of that buck-toothed mouth. I lost more lives on that damn overgrown fscking tuna than anywhere else in the game. *Shudder*.

The Price

[moertle]

I noticed that Commander Keen was available a while back and I was actually going to buy it. But they wanted $15!!! for a download only game. The price point for a 13-year-old-download-only game should be about $5. I'm sure if I dug through the bargain bin at Toys R Us I could find a boxed version for $5.

Re:The Price

[t0qer]

I totally agree with this post, $15 is a lot for such an old game. Id's greed doesn't just end there though, and please folks, consider what i'm about to say.

I'm in the process of opening up a game house / pc bang, whatever you want to call it. During my research I found out that some companies require gamehouses to pay licensing fee's for each title they carry. This isn't just a one time fee or even something reasonable, if you're running a 40 pc gamehouse you can expect to pay 10k + per year per title.

Now my argument against this goes along these lines. Capcom, Atari, ect all provided more than just a cabinet when they sold you a game. You got a cabinet (physical security) Coin Mech (money validator) Access software (credits) Input Device (Joystick, buttons) Service contracts, monitor, and the game. Usually it was anywhere between a 50/50 to a 25/75 split for the quarters between the cabinet owner and the person that owned the property.

Now with a gamehouse, I'm providing those first 6 items, while the game company only provides the game. After looking at paying off employee's, loans, and a lease, these fee's are going to be eating up enough of my profits to where me, the owner is going to be lucky to break even at the end of the month. On top of all that I have a machine that needs to be replaced every 2-3 years to stay current with the CPL standard so I can host CPL qualifyers at my place.

Now I could see paying licensing fee's if there was some sort of value added service, like my cdkey's were bound to my subnet in their multiplayer authentication database, that way if some smart ass kid try's to steal it for use on their home computer it would just say "Hey you're not playing from toqers gamehouse, sorry" (Note, i'm doing my best to secure machines so it doesn't happen but you never know) At least that would take care of one of the 6 items I have to provide.

I'm going to pay these fee's only because I have too. I wouldn't mind testing the legal waters of this, but as a startup gamehouse I am in no position to do so. In the future though, I want the game companies to understand that if they don't want me taking them to court and suing their asses under fair use laws, they better step up to the plate and at least make a better case for these fee's than "Well you're making money on it" Better CYA now and start adding features to the gamehouse versions of your games, because I'm a comin for you.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Other Games

[jweatherley]

I'm guessing that the Commander Keen source will be x86 assembly. Might be interesting to those in the know but a lot less useful than C source - no porting to other platforms. Does anyone know for sure what it was written in? Come on JohnC - get away from the rocketry for a few minutes and talk about some important stuff!

Re:Other Games

[MisterFancypants]

Quake 2 is open source. Commander Keen isn't. Both from ID.

Can someone exlpain this to me?

Practicality? Keen came out in a different era. One of hitting the hardware directly, using mainly assembly language. The code is of virtually no use today. You could as easily rewrite the code from scratch in C/C++ than port it up.

Selling?!

[Anonymous Coward]

HELLO?

Maybe they haven't heard the news: Rockstar Games is giving Grand Theft Auto away. Selling these old games just won't cut it anymore.

No technical support!

[saskboy]

"Please be aware the game you are purchasing will be delivered to you via electronic download. There WILL NOT be a hard copy of the game sent to you. Because of this, we STRONGLY recommend backing up the file after you download it.

NOTICE: Technical support is not available for this title.
"

So, they overcharge for software, don't provide any version upgrades, and no technical support unless you pay. Sounds like buying software from Microsoft.

Re:Other Games

[AlternateSyndicate]

I can speak somewhat authoritatively on this issue.

A long long time ago, I emailed John Carmack about releasing the Commander Keen 4 source code. He replied saying he did not know what happened to it.

Later a friend of mine and I attempted to clone Commander Keen 4 from a disassembly. It turns out that the codebase is very very *very* similar to the released Wolfenstein 3D source, which made things a little easier. We eventually gave up, but our work provided the information and impetus to help the community in making original Keen 4 maps, which has now been refined into a fairly easy process, I am told.

While all this was happening, John Romero made a post on the 3D Realms forums indicating that he had all of the source code to the Commander Keen games. I promptly emailed Romero asking him if he would release the source. He stated that he would love to release the source, but he would not do so without Carmack's blessing. I periodically prodded him about it, but with starting his own company and things, apparently the idea got lost in the shuffle.

As far as id offering these games on their website, this is no big deal. All the Keen games (except for Aliens ate my Babysitter and maybe Keen Dreams) have been available on the 3D Realms webstore for a very long time.

Some of the best games...

[Junta]

Are the old ones. For those seeking to play old DOS games in a modern environment, try dosbox (http://dosbox.zophar.net/) It does better than dosemu in a lot of games, especially with sound.

I just wish I could play Privateer with sound without actually having an ISA sounblaster card... Maybe one day....

Until then, Freelancer is surprisingly close in spirit to Privateer.

Also, to Star Control 2 fans, in case you didn't know (who doesn't by now?), check out http://sc2.sourceforge.net/. A full source release targeted at SDL... Very cool and cross platform.