Overview
Eight-year-old boy genius Billy Blaze has built an interstellar spaceship out of soup cans, rubber tubing, and his brother's modified football helmet. As his alter-ego Commander Keen, he discovers via his homemade ham radio that a race of aliens called the Shikadi are plotting to destroy the Milky Way galaxy using an armada of antimatter weapons.
To stop them, Keen travels to the planet Gnosticus IV to consult the Keepers of the Oracle. However, he arrives to find the Keepers have been kidnapped and hidden across the dangerous Shadowlands. Armed with his trusty neural stunner and his iconic pogo stick, Keen must bounce, shoot, and climb his way through lush alien forests, treacherous caves, and ancient temples. The game is famous for its creative enemies, most notably the "Dopefish," an incredibly stupid, perpetually hungry fish that has since become one of the longest-running inside jokes in the gaming industry.
Visual Archive
Behind The Scenes
The Smooth Scrolling Miracle
In the early 90s, PCs were completely outclassed by the Nintendo Entertainment System when it came to side-scrolling platformers. PC hardware simply couldn't redraw the screen fast enough to move a character smoothly across a background without severe screen-tearing and stuttering. That was until legendary programmer John Carmack invented "Adaptive Tile Refresh." By only redrawing the specific tiles on the edge of the screen as the player moved, Carmack essentially tricked the PC into rendering butter-smooth, console-quality parallax scrolling.
The Birth of id Software and the Shareware Empire
Goodbye, Galaxy! (which comprised Episodes 4 and 5 of the Keen saga) was the title that truly established id Software as an industry powerhouse. Distributed by Scott Miller's Apogee Software via the "Shareware" model, the first episode was given away for free on bulletin board systems (BBS), ending with a cliffhanger that encouraged players to mail a check to Texas for the rest of the game. The massive financial success of Keen directly funded id Software's next, much darker venture: Wolfenstein 3D.