Aggrogate

Friday Flashback: Commander Keen

This week's flashback is a bit of a strange one, because it's not a game I've played a million times and have memorized perfectly. In fact, I'm not even sure if I ever played it on my own computer. However, it still holds a place in my heart because it helped while away the hours during my high school's programming class. After I finished my BASIC assignments (yes, BASIC was all my high school had), I played one of two games on the computer lab's systems: Virtual Pool and Commander Keen.

In a way, Commander Keen was just a Mario rip-off. However, it was an excellent Mario rip-off that Tom Hall and John freaking Carmack developed. In fact, according to Hardcore Gaming 101, Hall and Carmack originally developed a perfect port of the first level in Super Mario Bros. 3 in hoping to pitch a PC port of the game itself to Nintendo. Nintendo didn't bite, but Apogee looked at the concept and decided to run with it as an entirely new series. And so Commander Keen was born.

While it looks like a Mario rip-off on the surface, mechanically Commander Keen evolved into a strange blend of Mario, Mega Man, and Ducktales. Besides jumping, you had a laser gun with limited ammo, a pogo stick, and a variety of other items to get through the various levels. Between levels, you explored the world through an overhead map, like in Mario 3.

Since this was an Apogee-published PC game in the early 90's, it was shareware. It came on a disk with the first chapter, Marrooned on Mars, complete and free. If you wanted the other two chapters, The Earth Explodes and Keen Must Die!, you had to pay for it. Tons of games used this model in the 90's, including Doom and Quake.

The story is an amusing romp. You play 8-year-old Billy Blaze, a super-genius kid who builds his own space ship and flies to Mars where he meets the Vorticons, evil aliens who want to destroy Earth. It's silly, but it's meant to be silly. It's almost like playing a Spaceman Spiff video game.

While Commander Keen himself isn't particularly memorable as a character, his series paved the way for a much more iconic (and much more tardy) character, Duke Nukem. The first two Duke Nukem games were side-scrolling platformers structured very similarly to Commander Keen and published by Apogee.

If you want to go back to the days of yesteryear with Commander Keen, you can download the game for just $5 on Steam. It includes the first episode, the follow-up two episodes (that comprised the "Invasion of the Vorticons" story), and the 4th and 5th episodes released a year later as the sequel, "Goodbye Galaxy!").