Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons
The trilogy was lauded by reviewers due to the graphical achievement and humorous style, and id Software went on to develop other successful games, including Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993).There are also colored keycards that grant access to locked parts of levels, and in the third episode on rare occasions an ankh, which gives Keen temporary invulnerability.In the first episode, eight-year-old child Billy Blaze builds a spaceship and puts on his older brother's football helmet to become Commander Keen.Upon reaching the lair, he discovers that the Grand Intellect is actually his school rival Mortimer McMire, whose IQ is "a single point higher" than Keen's.[6] The scrolling technique did not meet Softdisk's coding guidelines as it needed at least a 16-color EGA graphics processor, and the programmers in the office who did not work on games were not as impressed as Romero.The manager of the team, 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 then spent the next 72 hours working non-stop on the demo, which copied Super Mario Bros. 3 with some shortcuts taken in the artwork, sound, and level design, and a title screen that credited the game to the programmers under the name Ideas from the Deep, a name Romero had used for some prior Softdisk projects.[11] He wanted to convince Romero to publish more levels for his previous Pyramids of Egypt—an adventure game in which the player navigates mazes while avoiding Egyptian-themed traps and monsters—through Apogee's shareware model.[13] Ideas from the Deep convened to come up with the design for the game, and 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.[17] 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.The group split into different roles: Hall became the game designer and creative director, John Carmack and Romero were the programmers, and Wilbur the manager.[13][18] As the principal designer, Hall's personal experiences and philosophies 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.[13] Other influences on Hall for the game were Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953) and other Chuck Jones cartoons, and "The Available Data on the Worp Reaction", a 1953 short story by Lion Miller about a child constructing a spaceship.[20] 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.Miller described the game as "a little atom bomb" to magazine editors and BBS controllers when asked about it; its success led him to recruit his mother and hire his first employee to handle sales and phone calls from interested players, and to quit his other job and move Apogee from his house into an office.[24] Apogee announced plans to license the game to another publisher for a Nintendo Entertainment System port in an advertising flyer that year, but no such version was ever created.Acknowledging its debt to Super Mario Bros., he called it, including the Vorticon trilogy, "one of the best games of its type" and praised it for not being "mindlessly hard", though still requiring some thought to play through, and especially for the humor in the graphics and gameplay.Shortly thereafter, John Carmack was confronted by their boss, Softdisk owner Al Vekovius, who had become suspicious of the group's increasingly erratic, disinterested, and surly behavior at work, as well as their multiple requests for computer upgrades.
Developer(s)Ideas from the DeepPublisher(s)Apogee SoftwareDesigner(s)Tom HallProgrammer(s)John CarmackJohn RomeroArtist(s)Adrian CarmackCommander KeenPlatform(s)MS-DOSMicrosoft WindowsGenre(s)Side-scrollingplatformerSingle-playerplatform video gameid SoftwareSoftdiska way to implementIBM-compatiblepersonal computersvideo game consoleshome computersCommodore 64Super Mario Bros. 3NintendoScott MillersharewareWolfenstein 3Dpogo sticksave their progressraygundisk magazineShreveport, LouisianaMichael Abrashcomputer gameIBM-compatible general-purpose computersNintendo Entertainment Systemadaptive tile refreshplayer characteran eponymous previous Gamer's Edge gameMario franchisescience fictionGreen Bay PackersSigmund FreudDuck Dodgers in the 24½th CenturyChuck JonesGeorge Carlinsecrets and hidden areasbulletin board systemsPC MagazinePC WorldCQ Amateur RadioShareware Industry AwardsCommander Keen seriesSandy PetersenDragonengineQuakeConCommander Keen in Keen DreamsCommander Keen in Goodbye, GalaxyCommander Keen in Aliens Ate My BabysitterFormGenGame Boy ColorActivisionSteam SpyZiff DavisPetersen, SandyDragon Magazine3D RealmsShacknewsArs TechnicaCondé NastGamasutraMiller, ScottThe New York TimesPC GamesIDG CommunicationsFort Worth Star-TelegramNewspapers.comInternational Data GroupEurogamerCRC PressKushner, DavidMasters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop CultureRandom HouseMobyGamesInternet ArchiveCommander Keen (2001)list of gamesArctic AdventureBio MenaceBoppin'Cosmo's Cosmic AdventureCrystal CavesDark AgesDuke NukemDuke Nukem IIKroz seriesMajor StrykerMath RescueMonster BashMonuments of MarsMystic TowersPaganitzuPharaoh's TombRealms of ChaosRise of the TriadSecret AgentStargunnerWacky WheelsWord RescueList of minor video gamesTerminal VelocityDuke Nukem 3DShadow WarriorBalls of SteelMax PayneDuke Nukem ForeverBombshellIon FuryGraven