Overview
When his parents go out of town and the babysitter falls asleep, 8-year-old boy genius Billy Blaze dons his older brother's Green Bay Packers helmet and transforms into Commander Keen. Flying to Mars in his homemade Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket, Keen explores the planet only to have his vital ship parts stolen by the dog-like Vorticons.
Equipped with his trusty pogo stick and a neural stunner, Keen must travel across the Martian landscape, exploring cities and shrines to recover his missing parts, prevent the Vorticons from destroying Earth, and make it back to his room before his parents get home.
Visual Archive
Behind The Scenes
The Mario Clone That Changed PC Gaming
Before Commander Keen, smooth side-scrolling platformers like Super Mario Bros. were thought to be impossible on PC hardware. John Carmack, a brilliant programmer at Softdisk, figured out a clever hack called "adaptive tile refresh" that allowed PC EGA graphics cards to redraw only the edges of the screen, creating perfectly smooth, console-quality scrolling.
The Birth of id Software:
- The Nintendo Pitch: The team built a perfect PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3 using this tech and pitched it to Nintendo. Nintendo declined, preferring to keep Mario strictly on their own consoles.
- Going Indie: Realizing what they had, the team (Carmack, Romero, and Hall) decided to create their own original game, working nights and weekends in a lake house in Shreveport, Louisiana.
- The Shareware Revolution: Partnering with Scott Miller at Apogee, they released the first episode ("Marooned on Mars") for free on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). The game was an overnight smash hit, generating thousands of dollars in mail-order checks and funding the official founding of id Software.
Without Commander Keen proving the viability of high-performance PC action games, we might never have gotten Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, or Quake.