Commander Keen
The series follows the eponymous Commander Keen, the secret identity of the eight-year-old genius Billy Blaze, as he defends the Earth and the galaxy from alien threats with his homemade spaceship, rayguns, and pogo stick.After the release of Goodbye, Galaxy and Aliens Ate My Babysitter in 1991, id Software planned to make a third set of episodes for the following December, titled Commander Keen in The Universe is Toast!.[22] In the first episode, "Marooned on Mars", eight-year-old Billy Blaze, a child genius, builds a spaceship (the "Beans with Bacon Megarocket") and puts on his older brother's football helmet to become Commander Keen.In "Keen Must Die" he fights through the cities and outposts of the Vorticon home planet to reach the Grand Intellect, who is revealed to be his school rival Mortimer McMire, who he then defeats.The main series of games continues in "Secret of the Oracle", where Keen builds a faster-than-light radio and overhears plans by a race of aliens known as the Shikadi to destroy the galaxy.The manager of the team and fellow programmer, Jay Wilbur, recommended that they take the demo to Nintendo itself, to position themselves as capable of building a PC version of Super Mario Bros. for the company.The group—composed of Carmack, Romero, Hall, and Wilbur, along with Lane Roathe, the editor for Gamer's Edge, decided to build a full demo game for their idea to send to Nintendo.[2][29] Hall suggested a console-style platformer in the vein of Super Mario Bros., as they had the technology made for it; he further recommended a science fiction theme, and developed a short introduction that convinced the team to make Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons.[30] Billy Blaze, eight-year-old genius, working diligently in his backyard clubhouse has created an interstellar starship from old soup cans, rubber cement and plastic tubing.While his folks are out on the town and the babysitter has fallen asleep, Billy travels into his backyard workshop, dons his brother's football helmet, and transforms into...[2][10] The game's design was largely driven by Tom Hall: Romero and especially John Carmack were focused almost exclusively on the programming; Wilbur was not involved in the game's design; and Adrian Carmack joined late in development and found the project's "cute" art style, till then mostly created by Hall, far-removed from his preferred, darker, style.[2][31] Hall's personal experiences and philosophies, therefore, strongly impacted the game: Keen's red shoes and Green Bay Packers football helmet were items Hall wore as a child, dead enemies left behind corpses due to his belief that child players should be taught that death had permanent consequences, and enemies were based loosely on his reading of Sigmund Freud's psychological theories, such as that of the id.[2] Other influences on Hall for the game were Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century and other Chuck Jones cartoons, and "The Available Data on the Worp Reaction", a short story about a child constructing a spaceship.[3] The level maps were designed using a custom-made program called Tile Editor (TEd), which was first created for Dangerous Dave and was used for the entire Keen series as well as several other games.When their boss and owner of Softdisk Al Vekovius confronted them on their plans, as well as their use of company resources to develop the game, the team made no secret of their intentions.By August they had completed a beta version of episode four, "Secret of the Oracle", and Romero sent it off to a fan he had met from Canada, Mark Rein, who had offered to play-test the game.Within a few weeks of being hired, Rein made a deal to get id into the commercial market: to take the sixth episode and make it a stand-alone game, published as a retail title through FormGen instead of part of a shareware trilogy.There, they worked on Goodbye, Galaxy, their remaining Softdisk games, and the now standalone Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter between August and December.Another trilogy of episodes, titled The Universe Is Toast, was planned for December 1992; id worked on it for a couple of weeks, before shifting focus to Wolfenstein 3D (1992).[12] Activision formally announced at the start of May 2001 that a new Commander Keen game had been developed by David A. Palmer Productions, and would be released at the end of the month.Miller described the game as "a little atom bomb" to magazine editors and BBS controllers when asked about it, and recruited his mother and hired his first employee to handle sales and phone calls from interested players.[10] Aliens Ate My Babysitter also did not sell as well as hoped for by id, which the team partially blamed on what they felt was terrible box art done by a company that had previously designed packaging for Lipton tea.Acknowledging its debt to Super Mario Bros., he called it, especially Goodbye, Galaxy, "one of the best games of its type" and praised it for not being "mindlessly hard", instead requiring some thought to play through, and especially for the humor in the graphics and gameplay.The Standard Galactic Alphabet, a writing system used to depict alien languages in the galaxy throughout the series, is used for textual signs and directions and was created by Tom Hall beginning with Invasion of the Vorticons as a way to pass hidden messages to players.
Top: Standard Galactic Alphabet artificial script
Bottom: Latin script
Commander Keen (video game)Genre(s)Side-scrollingplatformerDeveloper(s)id SoftwarePublisher(s)3D RealmsSoftdiskFormGenActivisionTom HallJohn CarmackJohn RomeroArtist(s)Adrian CarmackComposer(s)Robert PrinceMS-DOSGame Boy ColorSteamOSMicrosoft WindowsNintendo SwitchAndroidCommander Keen in Invasion of the VorticonsCommander Keenplatformraygunspogo stickApogee SoftwaresharewareCommander Keen in Keen DreamsCommander Keen in Goodbye, GalaxyCommander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitteradaptive tile refreshIBM-compatible general-purpose computersvideo game consolesNintendo Entertainment SystemWolfenstein 3Dfirst-person shootersvideo game industryin-jokesmoddingplatform video gameparallax scrollingSuper Fighter TeamIndiegogocrowdfundingGNU GPL-2.0-or-laterBethesda'sfireman's polesraygundisk magazineShreveport, Louisianacomputer gameSuper Mario Bros. 3an eponymous previous Gamer's Edge gameNintendoMario franchiseScott MillerGreen Bay PackersSigmund FreudDuck Dodgers in the 24½th CenturyChuck JonesGeorge Carlinsecrets and hidden areasbulletin board systemssound cardsBobby PrinceMadison, Wisconsinhandheld game consolePC MagazinePC WorldCQ Amateur RadioPC ZoneLiptonShareware Industry AwardsSandy PetersenDragonSteam SpyJean-Philippe ChainiauxengineQuakeConwriting systemlanguagessubstitution cipherUnder-ConScript Unicode RegistryGNU UnifontMinecraftartificial scriptLatin scriptWolfensteinWilliam "B.J." BlazkowiczDoomguyDuke NukemBio Menacelevel editorKickstarterComputer Gaming WorldZiff DavisGameSpotCBS InteractivePolygonVox MediaPocket GamerArs TechnicaCondé NastPetersen, SandyDragon MagazineInternet ArchiveGamasutraRomero, JohnInternational Data GroupDennis PublishingAllGameAll Media NetworkEurogamerShacknewsKotakuGawker MediaTwitterRock, Paper, ShotgunHall, TomMasters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop CultureRandom HouseCommander Keen (2001)