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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.
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.
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 [...]."
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).