Arbitrary Review - Commander Keen Series

Today, as part of my now-ongoing arbitrary review theme, I'm going to do a review of Commander Keen, the series, as a whole.

I wouldn't trust those trees

Commander Keen is a 2D Action/shooter/Platformer from the 1990s. You play as Billy Blaze, the ten-year old genius who dons his brother's Packers helmet and hops in his home made space ship to defend the galaxy as the titular character himself. You use your neural stun gun to zap monsters and aliens while rescuing innocents and thwarting the plots of evil bullies/supervillains from down the street.

The games are the first foray of id software. Old school computer gamers might remember id as

the company that popularized Shareware distribution. You can now remember them as the people who also made Doom and Wolfenstein, two of the most classic FPS games ever made, before any of them were made at all.

And you can't get much more old-school than that

id software was pretty revolutionary in their early days. When they weren't pioneering the most popular style of gameplay today, they were creating the first full-scrolling platforming game ever made on a PC. That's Commander Keen for those of you keeping score at home.

The story goes (from the Wiki page, at least) that during the turn of the century, one of the guys who would found id Software discovered a way to do full screen scrolling on a computer using the latest graphics card of the time.

Eat your heart out, Miner VGA

The original game that he made was humorously called "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement", and was basically a parody set of levels from Super Mario Bros. 3, showing that it could be done. John Carmack, the man who made this silly game, sent it to Nintendo to convince them that they could port Super Mario Bros 3 to the PC, but also sent it to one of his friends John Romero. They teamed up and made a full Super Mario Bros 3 port of the PC, but Nintendo declined their offer to license the game.

Oh what could have been...

The story would have ended there, but shortly after that, Apogee approached the programmers and offered to distribute a game for them using the software they had developed. Thus, Apogee and id teamed up to release Commander Keen.

The series ran up to episode 6, "Aliens Ate my Baby Sitter" (and had a non-canon game called "Keen Dreams"), but the series evaporated as id Software moved on to other, greener pastures.

Remember him?

But Commander Keen holds a special place in my heart. For one, I've always had a fondness for platformers, and for its time, it was the greatest platform game on the PC. On top of that, it appeals to everything a young boy dreams about. A genius ten-year old makes a rocket out of soup cans, listens in on alien signals, and goes off in his home-made rocket with a football helmet and what essentially is a toy gun to save the world. That's the sort of thing a kid would make up on his own and do in the back yard, and they present it here as an actual adventure. Silly yes, but they play that up so well that it's all the more fun for it.

Okay, so they probably wouldn't wear a pink shirt on purpose...

We will probably not see another Keen game in awhile though, unless the legal complications get cleared up somehow. But episodes 2-5 are available on Steam for download, so if you enjoy platforming games, I suggest you give it a try.

My personal favorite is the one we got with Shareware - number 5 - with the Dope Fish and deadly blue mushrooms.

And damn those mushrooms for all eternity.