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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."
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 [...]."
.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.
Quote from AlternateSyndicate (644818) on Sunday March 16 2003, @03:19PM (#5524737) I'm guessing exactly nothing has changed since then.