Commander Keen, the game that made id
In 1993, when I was seven years old, our family's computer was a 386. I guess it was a decent machine for its day, it was a commodore ibm compatible with a Gravis UltraSound soundcard. My parents used mainly the word processing program, and I of course played games. Two of the first games I ever played was Commander Keen 4: Secret of the oracle, and Keen dreams, both shareware. Later I acquired the full versions of 5 and 6 as well. Although we had other games, these were my favorites, they were just so much fun, and they still are. They had great gameplay, great graphics and great music, the competition looked pale.
Dopefish - the second dumbest creature
in the universe
The history of Commander Keen starts on September 20th, 1990. John Carmack had been working on a game engine for some time, which could scroll smoothly both vertical and horizontal, something that had not been done before on the ibm pc. That day was a breakthrough. John Carmack and Tom Hall, at that time working at Softdisk, were working late that day. John was very close to finishing his game engine, and Tom was working in the apple II department. Tom joined John to see what he was doing, and John showed him his scrolling engine. They wanted to make something to impress John Romero, also working for Softdisk at that time. Tom suggested they could make the first level of Super Mario 3, and so they did. However, instead of animating a Mario character they just used Dangerous Dave, a character from a game that John Romero had written earlier. Tom called the demo "Dangerous Dave in copyright infringement", and they copied it to a floppy disk and placed it on John Romero's desk and went home.
When Romero came to the office the next day, he ran the demo on the disk, and was very impressed. The demo was in ega though, and the scrolling trick did only work in ega, Softdisk did not allow games that did not work in cga as well, meaning they could not publish a game using this engine through Softdisk. So when Carmack and Tom came to work, Romero suggested that they should start their own company. Id software was born that day.
Video of Dangerous Dave in copyright infringement
They sent the demo to Nintendo, thinking that they could make the official pc version of Super Mario, but Nintendo did not want to enter the pc market, and wanted Super Mario exclusively on the Nintendo. So id needed to make an original game. And that's when Tom came up with the idea: Commander Keen - defender of earth. They still had a contract with Softdisk to write games for them, so at day time, they was writing games for Softdisk. Then, in the evenings they were working on Commander Keen, and in three months, it was done.
Goodbye Galaxy retail box from GT software
Then, on December 14th 1990, Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons was released. The game was released as shareware through Apogee. The first episode was free for everybody to copy, and then you could buy the remaining two episodes if you wanted to. And many did, Commander Keen was a hit. The id crew now left Softdisk, but they was still obliged to make a number of games for them, and as a result of that, id made Keen Dreams for Softdisk.
As the original Commander Keen became such a hit, they now wanted to make a sequel to the first Keen trilogy, and they started to work on that in June 1991. The game engine had developed a lot since Vorticons, and the new keen games got much better graphics than the first trilogy, and also supported sound cards. Originally, the new keen games were also supposed to be a trilogy, but Formgen talked them into releasing one episode commercially. And so Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy, consisting of the two games "secret of the oracle" and "the Armageddon machine" was released by Apogee, and the last one, "Aliens ate my babysitter", was released by Formgen. "Secret of the oracle" was released free as shareware.
There was a plan to make yet another series of Keen games called "the universe is toast". But this idea never came to life because of id's other projects got in the way. Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom was released, and keen forgotten. But maybe someday, we will see the return of Keen.
Video:
I played through all the levels of Keen 4 and Keen Dreams, and put it up on youtube. I saved the game in between each level completed, but all levels are played in one go, except "pyramid of the forbidden". I couldnt finish it without dying, so I saved the progress throughout the level and put it all together afterwards. Both games are played on normal difficulty.
Different releases in my collection:
Here you can see some of the different releases and the contents of the boxes:
