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20 Years of Commander Keen
angry tapir writes "This week marks the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Commander Keen game. For those too young to remember, Commander Keen was a series of shareware 2D platform games for the PC released by Apogee Software (aka 3D Realms) developed by no less than id Software — the developers of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake."
I wonder why they don't just release the source/game to celebrate or something. Its not like they're going to make any more money off it.
God, I'm old. :P
I still remember getting the shareware version on floppy from a games magazine. Great game, lots of fun. Then came Doom and switched cable two player Doom... ahhhhhhhh
Oh, god, I remember the Commander Keen games. I was a purely PC gamer back in the early 90s; the parents wouldn't have a console in the house at the time. To be honest, I don't remember the original Commander Keen being particularly great. It was one of those EGA platformers with very sparse graphics that seemed to be everywhere on the PC at the time. I think of it like the original Duke Nukem platformers; games which are remembered not in their own right, but for what they went on to spawn.
What did blow me away, however, was Keen 4 (Secret of the Oracle), which came out a year later. This was a huge leap forwards in terms of graphics and sound. The sad thing is that I can still hum some of the pieces of background music from that game. The gameplay was also much improved, with Keen's movement feeling much more natural, and some really great level design. It actually gave PC gamers of the time a game that they could pretend was almost as good as the likes of Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog. I don't think I saw a better platformer on the PC until Jazz Jackrabbit, which I'm fairly sure was a few years later.
Actually, isn't the Keen series available on Steam these days? I must pick that up this evening. Take a look at the episodes from the "full" version that I never saw in my youth.
Doom doesn't need a special age for celebration. It's just too awesome for that.
I remember I had to fix my uncle's computer because he had deleted COMMAND.COM thinking it was part of Commander Keen.
They don't have them anymore. They were sold to FormGen by Apogee, who in turn sold them to Activision, so we can safely assume they're down the bit bucket.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Dunno, it seems to me DOOM should do the same as everyone else celebrate 18 when it can go get drunk and laid. Well, at least drunk anyway. But laid is right next, as soon as it can get a girl into its mom's basement that is totally awed by its grenade jumping skills. Any day now ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've paid Amazon for 20-plus year old movies and books before. Why should buying a 20 year old game from Steam be any different?
Correction: not Activision, but Infogrames, which is now Atari. It went something like this:
With CKeen, episode 6 (Aliens Ate My Babysitter), the game was published by FormGen, and Apogee was only a retailer. In 1996, FormGen was sold to GT Interactive, along with the rights to Commander Keen. In 1999, Infogrames Entertainment SA took a controlling stake in GT and renamed the whole company Infogrames, Inc. Then, in 2003, Infogrames Inc. changed their name to Atari Inc. and it sits like that up until now. Formally, Atari is the owner of all the IP surrounding Commander Keen.
I mistook Atari for Activision since it was Activision who published the GameBoy Color version in 2001 (leading to much Fanon Discontinuity).
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idstuff
never forget
If I recall, it was the smooth side scrolling animation which made Keen legendary, before then side scrollers hadn't been done all that well on the PC
Yes. It was the first publicly released PC game that replicated the side-scrolling technique used to make smooth scrolling in 8-bit consoles.
Strangely, the first one *could* have been a port of Super Mario Bros. 3, because the technique was designed to replicate that game (iD actually shopped a fully complete clone to Nintendo, who turned them down on the idea).
Every year on Doom's birthday John Carmack throws a Chuck Norris in to the sun.
YOU LIE!
Chuck Norris was on the design team for Doom, which was originally so difficult that only Chuck Norris could beat it. He finally conceded that it wouldn’t be much of a success unless they made it easy enough for everyone else to play. They did, and Chuck Norris didn’t even need to beat Doom anymore. He just looked at it, and it beat itself. However, rumor has it that he still owns a copy of the original and plays it occasionally.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
Hell, I've probably spent more on ZX Spectrum emulators than I ever did on ZX Spectrum hardware when it was current - through Gerton Lunter's original "Z80" emulator to modern-day "Spectactulator". The free ones don't cut the mustard and don't have the licensed ROM's for certain add-ons, and I can play all my old games again. There is *nothing* like a quick blast on Chaos at 16x speed (if you can control the cursor okay) in a window while you're doing other stuff. And Batty still kick arse too.
Buying "old" stuff isn't a bad thing. Buying "shit" from any era is. I am more likely to laugh at someone who spends £60 on a game that they'll complete or throw away in an hour than someone who spends £100 on emulators (yes, there are plenty of free ones but the more niche systems tend to be on a pay-for basis - hell, I own a CD-i emulator!) so they can have thousands of hours of gaming. Cost per hour of entertainment - that's my statistic. If that's too low, I won't bother. Currently I consider anything over £1 / hour a waste of money and most of my Steam games get me a LOT more than that (one is currently on it's 256th hour for just under £5... work it our for yourself). Now think how much people piss away on DVD's, Bluray, and cinema, arcade games, fruit machines, pinball, etc. not to mention modern full-price video games (including the costs of having the appropriate equipment for all of those things) and how much they actually get out of it. Some of them are in the "more than £15 / hour" category at times! Besides the fact, if they are actually any good as games, you'll be picking them up next year for half the price (and half the price again the year after) and have a better-bugfixed version of the EXACT SAME game for much cheaper.
Gimme a hundred games from when I was a kid than a single modern-day one, any day. It's called sensible buying, and getting your money's worth. I *do* own Keen on Steam. It cost me £1 or so I think, on a deal. If I play it for an hour, that's my money's worth out of it. Now, how many times would I have to play through the "newest" game, and enjoy every second of doing that, in order to bring it down to the same amount per hour of entertainment?
For one it was Shareware.
Shareware at the time was actually Really Crappy games and applications. Commander-Keen was one of the first shareware title games that was of a "professional" quality. Good Graphics (for 320x200x16 colors) good game play... This was one of the first games that came out that was shareware and worth expanding.
Secondly platform games were new back then. Sure some were out but mostly for consoles. There were some for the PC. But at the time the IBM PC just introduced the EGA graphics. Before we were stuck with CGA Cyan, Magenta, White, Black. Well 16 colors that can replace black. Cyan could also be light green or dark green, magenta could be Light Red or Dark Red, and White could be Yellow or brown. In general Ok for graphs sucked for games.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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This explains global warming, he's making the sun more powerful.
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