20 Years of Commander Keen 152
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."
And to think... (Score:1)
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Maybe 3 years from now, when it turns 20...
Re:And to think... (Score:4, Insightful)
Doom doesn't need a special age for celebration. It's just too awesome for that.
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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.
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the original Doom opened a gateway to hell
Chuck beat the devil and his minions, but decided that life would be too easy for mere humans, so he freed the devil, and insisted that Id release the easier version of Doom
Why not 18? (Score:3)
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 ;)
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Many, if not most States, are not in the U.S.A.
Actually you fail reading comprehension, all of the "states" in his sentence are in the U.S.A. He wasn't talking about states in other countries. :P
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or "states" in the generic geopolitical sense.
If anyone is inclined to argue that "states" are supposed to be sovereign, I'd point out that argument was comprehensively lost 145 years ago. Continuing to argue is just dickish pedantry.
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It does for the bullet recipient. :-)
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A sovereign state is supposed to be able to defend its borders. If a state is not able to defend its borders, it is not sovereign. Yes, the argument was lost when other states invaded.
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By that logic, before the UN recognizes any self-proclaiming sovereign state (Israel? Palestine?) it should send in some troops first and find out whether their claim of sovereignty is legitimate.
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Re:And to think... (Score:4, Informative)
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).
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Captain Comic [wikipedia.org]
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This was my family's very first game! Our shareware version was unable to re-map the keys so we had to have one person doing the moving and jumping and one person pushing Insert (for some reason) to shoot. Guess that makes it a 2 player game!!! *laughs*
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Wow me too! No idea why Insert is the shoot key. I was 5 so my mum helped me shoot. But there was also a bug in version 1 (or possibly some BIOS problem on my machine) where Space and Insert couldn't be pressed simultaneously, so if one player was firing, the other couldn't jump. Splash.
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I've always loved Commander Keen.
It reminded me a lot of Spaceman Spiff from Calvin and Hobbs, that this was all a boy's imagination.
The levels were challenging without being impossible. And then there was the pogo stick.
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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.
I used to love this game... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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You'd be surprised... I paid $5 (I think) on steam for the whole series a few months ago.
Half out of guilt for all the time I spent playing a pirated game, but still.
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I bought it on steam a while back as well so they're still making money.
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What? And violate the holy Ai Pee? Think of that poor endangered ai [wikipedia.org], who peed for you.
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It's probably because iD don't have the rights to the game. They have, after all, released the source for most of their other games.
Re:I used to love this game... (Score:5, Informative)
.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.
I was 17... (Score:2)
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
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Get off my lawn!
I was 33. I started working at Johns Hopkins APL which was my first taste of the Internet. I ftp'd the games but now I can't recall the site. It had loads of shareware games though.
[John]
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65939? Newbie.
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God, I'm old. :P
No you're not. I was about your age when Keen came out. There was a shop in town that sold shareware floppies for $5 each.
Keen was great, but his son, Duke Nukem, was funner and funny (loved shooting the Energizer Bunny).
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Keen was great, but his son, Duke Nukem, was funner and funny...
Keen came out on 14 December, 1990; Duke Nukem came out on July 1, 1991. Thats 7 months later. Furthermore; Keen is 8 years old in his first adventure; whereas Duke is fully grown (can't say he's "mature" though).
Lets face facts and admit that Duke Nukem is Keen's late-blossoming older brother.
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No... obviously Keen later converted his spaceship into a time machine.
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Commander Keen (Score:2)
Along with Civilization I, Dune I and Wolfenstein, it was one of the reasons I could thrive with my old 286 until 1998.
And the lack of money to buy anything else, of course.
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C&C and later games never quite captured those moments.
"Fremen units approaching"
LOL. Sends the harvesters to squash em'
"Saboteur approaching"
Oh shit. Checks if my walls are intact
"Nuclear launch detected"
Crosses fingers
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Dune 1 as the adventure game or 2 as RTS?
/afk (Score:1)
Remembering Keen (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Keen 4-6 and Duke Nukem 2 are still awesome. The earlier games aren't bad but I can see why someone who didn't grow up with them wouldn't be able to "get" it--the later games should be enjoyable to anyone who likes the genres (platformer and platform shooter, respectively), regardless of what they grew up playing.
Steam does have Keen; I got it when the complete id collection went on sale a year or so ago. The pack doesn't include episode 6 or Keen Dreams, though, so it's not all the games.
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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.
Yeah. It wasn't quite as good or pretty as Super Mario World (had a SNES) but close enough. Jazz Jackrabbit was another good one, though I've only played the demo.
Take a look at the episodes from the "full" version that I never saw in my youth.
Don't. Haven't played them myself but the consensus seems to be that they're not as good.
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Same as you I found the Alex Kids and Sonic games less enjoyable than Keen4.
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Apogee was built on Commander Keen and the Shareware model, especially theirs where you got part 1 of 3 free.
I ran a BBS back then that became one of the first Apogee Distribution sites, another innovation attributed to Apogee was getting thousands of BBS's across the country to essentially be mirror sites for their games. The system worked great because Apogee got the word out, and BBS SysOp's got cool games in their file transfer sections. I know all this seems like a moot point now with the Internet, b
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Man, I remember being so impressed by the graphics of Secret of the Oracle. Computers make me feel so old, when I hear guys these days talking about graphics I think about Commander Keen, Jill of the Jungle and Wolfenstein 3d. Graphics? Fuck that, I just want to kill something.
Scrolling engine (Score:2)
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.
Graphically, the first trilogy wasn't that great. But it was the first ever PC game to feature full-screen smoothly scrolling graphics. Before that, such performance was only possible on consoles.
PC games just repainted the whole world on each frame, and therefore to save performance, lots of games did only displayed the game world in a small window in the game screen (think like Captain Comic)
Keen was the first game to make popular the hardware trick enabling smooth scrolling.
Luckily by the time of the sec
Re:lol (Score:5, Insightful)
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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?
I agree whole heartedly. While I enjoy a lot of the games today, there are still old titles that haunt my memory. Especially some of those I never finished.
Solar Winds... Planescape:Torment... Might and Magic series...
There are a ton of old games that are of high quality and worth playing again.
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I will have to look into that site. I had problems running Fallout 1 and 2 I bought on Steam, seems they forgot to update the engines to handle a 64 bit Windows 7 machine, so it actually won't even run. Though I did get Fallout Tactics to run, I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I would have Fallout 1/2.
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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 "ol
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Since the key word in "abandonware" is "abandon", and iD still sells the Keen games, the Keen games aren't abandonware.
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I you left Keen on one of the moons in the Temple of Moons, he would moon you instead of reading a book :-)
Good times (Score:1)
C.Keen strangely invisible on other platforms (Score:2)
Keen was a fantastic 2D platformer. Why hasn't anyone ported it to the DS, PSP, iPhone, etc. ?
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Because the Gameboy Color remake sucked.
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I have it installed on my Nintendo Wii. You can read about and acquire the port here [wiibrew.org].
They apparently used the source of a DS port as a starting point.
All of these require homebrew enablement hacks.
Only ever played one of them (Score:2)
Secret of the Oracle. The one with the infamous fish. Only actually finished it in 2008, for that matter (I first played it around 1994, but never finished until rediscovering it a long time later).
SWIM SWIM HUNGRY
Eat Your Veggies (Score:1)
Dopefish Lives!
Nostalgia (Score:5, Funny)
I played it for the first time a few months ago. (Score:1)
To be honest, I didn't find it all that great. I guess you had to be there.
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The original trilogy hasn't aged well. The controls suck balls (and did even back then) and the graphics are horrid.
4, 5, and the elusive 6 are still excellent.
The controls are improved, the play is smooth, and they're pretty enough to be visually interesting most of the time. The graphics are in that "good enough" sweet spot where, though they may not look modern exactly, they aren't so far behind that they're a shock.
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I have all of the keen games. 1 thru 6 and dreams.
What about the great FTP archives? (Score:2)
If you're gonna go back to that era, someone needs to mention the great shareware FTP archives of the pre-Web internet: wustl.edu, garbo.uwasa.fi, simpnet (? it's been too long).
Am I the only one who kept checking the READMEs for new pointers by the maintainers? I probably downloaded way too many games on the recommendation of obscure Finnish professors :-)
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Ah yes, and before that, we used to buy CD's chock full of those games, loaded with files.bbs indexing, to put on the BBS. Nothing beats the satisfaction of your first color game download over a 2400 or 14.4k modem.
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never forget
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Man it would be great if these sites would make it into an archive and onto a torrent tracker somewhere.
For those too young to remember (Score:2)
The way to play Commander Keen authentically... (Score:1)
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As an aside, last time I pulled out an old PC and plugged it in out of curiosity, a 486 DX2-66, I found a copy of Quake on it. When I tried to run it it ran at about 3 fps, and Doom didn't break much over 15fps.
Did we really used to put up with that kind of shitty frame rate back then, or has, despite having not been touched for about 15 years, this system mysteriously slowed down? There didn't seem to be any problems with the hard drive or anything, can a processor even "just slow down"? I figured it'd jus
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Did the machine have a turbo button and if so did you make sure it was turned on?
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Also what resoloution were things set to, early 3D games got much slower if you tried to crank up the resoloution from the default 320x200 to say 640x480.
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No, it didn't have one, I think it was a 486 SX33 originally, so was really at the point where turbo buttons were starting to dissapear from cases.
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Did we really used to put up with that kind of shitty frame rate back then, or has, despite having not been touched for about 15 years, this system mysteriously slowed down?
Quake was one of, if not the, first game to require a decent FPU, something the 486 (even DXs) lacked.
DOOM should have been "great" on a machine like that, however (ie: as good as it's going to get). When it came out in 1993, a 486DX2/66 was pretty much the fastest machine normal people could buy.
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I remember playing Doom 1 on a 386 DX-40 with 4MB RAM, and it ran pretty smooth in low graphics mode.
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Yeah that's how I remember it too, I just find it so strange that it could've slowed down. I think I ran it at 320x240 or whatever the resolution was back then, it wouldn't have handled 640x480 well I know that, but I'm amazed that it just wouldn't even do 320x240 well nowadays for some reason. I'm just intrigued to know what the cause of such a slow down would be!
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Doom used to have a comm
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Awesome! (Score:2)
Commander Keen... What an awesome series of games with tons of personality.
Having always been more of a PC gamer I felt like the platform was deprived by a distinct lack of good platforming games. Then Commander Keen came along and there was something quite good to point to; the PC can do it too.
Compared to other platformers of the time it was actually a decent game, especially the later games where the tiling wasn't as simplistic and graphics and gameplay were more robust.
CloneKeen (Score:2)
There is an open source project for an engine to run the first 3 Keen games:
http://clonekeen.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I can't stress enough how much I want a new Keen game. Who owns the rights these days? Atari?
If I was a small game development company trying to make a name for myself, this would be a perfect project. There are WAY too many shooters, and it is hard to differentiate yourself in that market, especially on a budget.
But a good platformer can be developed on the cheap. New platformers still find ways to
Seeing this.... (Score:2)
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yeah, I just looked at those screenshots, and all I could think was that I was glad i had an Amiga and could play platformers like Zool, Chuck Rock and Superfrog. Granted, those games didn't all come out in 1990, but they ran on 1990 hardware.
BBS Downloads (Score:2)
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Simply holding the [G] [O] and [D] keys at the same time enabled God Mode. Can't beat that. And that super jump that allows you to pretty much float across an entire map was also pretty bad ass.
I remember one time, after managing to fall into a pit that was too deep for me to get out of but for some reason didn’t have spikes at the bottom, rather than going to the menu and starting the level over I started mashing buttons... and suddenly it says I beat the game and rescued all of the elders (though I didn’t have many points obviously). That was a surprise.
Too young... (Score:2)
For those too young to remember, Commander Keen was a series of shareware 2D platform games for the PC released by Apogee
One Word: DOPEFISH! (Score:2)
The early keen games may not be sophisticated by today's standards, but they're still fun. And Apogee had a great marketing plan. They would give away the first full game. Then if you liked it, you could purchase the sequels. Hmm...yes a bit like a dealer. ;-)
Appropriately enough, here is the Dopefish [youtube.com], who has a fan page [dopefish.com] and who's midi music theme will get stuck in your head.
Still have them on a floppy somewhere... (Score:2)
Ahhh keen.. wasted so much time in the drafting lab in HS playing keen (and then wolfenstein 3d, and Doom) instead of autocad...
-Tm
one of my better hacks... (Score:2)
Not that it was too difficult with a hex editor, and id software didn't try to obfuscate the levels or anything. But still, a couple weeks well spent!
One of My First Games Ever (Score:2)
One of the first games my siblings and I ever played on our first family computer. Jump started my love of gaming.
Remember in the first one (I think), you could stand in certain spots to make the wolves fall off the end of the world near the exits? *sigh* good times.
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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.
Re:id should give Tom Hall Keen's rights. (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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"(published commercially only by FormGen, Apogee resold it as a retailer; now discontinued)"
Is what the wiki says. And I have the Steam "Keen Complete" pack and it's not included either. That said, I really don't miss it - I only ever played episode 3 or 4 because I found it in a bargain bin when I was much younger so that's the only one that holds any memories for me.