Commander Keen

Commander Keen is the main character in a series of computer games developed by id Software in the early 1990s, which were successful at replicating the side-scrolling action of the NES Super Mario Bros. games in DOS. The cartoon-style platformers are notable for their pioneering use of EGA graphics and shareware distribution, and because they were the first games by id Software, who went on to develop blockbusters like Doom and Quake. The games were also exciting to the PC gaming community of the time because of John Carmack's revolutionary smooth-scrolling graphics engine. Although developed by id, most of the Commander Keen games were published by Apogee Software, an already established PC shareware game publisher.

History

John Carmack, a game programmer at Softdisk, found a trick that would allow smooth-scrolling graphics in PC games, but only with the 16-color EGA graphics card. Softdisk rejected the technology because they wanted to continue to support customers who only had 4-color CGA cards.

Related Topics:
John Carmack - Softdisk - CGA

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Carmack and his Softdisk colleague Tom Hall used their own time to put together a clone of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3, except for the hero, which they replaced with Dangerous Dave, a character from some of their games for Softdisk. They called it Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement and approached Nintendo with the demo, but the latter declined to enter the PC market at that time.

Related Topics:
Tom Hall - Super Mario Bros. 3 - Dangerous Dave - Nintendo

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The developers still thought their game technology had potential, so they left to form what would become id Software. The developers got in touch with Scott Miller of Apogee, who put up the money for Commander Keen's development, starting a profitable business relationship that would last until id self-published Doom.

Related Topics:
Id Software - Scott Miller - Doom

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Id's contract with Softdisk required them to write several more games for the company, one of which became Keen Dreams, called the "Lost Episode" of Commander Keen because it was not sold by Apogee as the others were.

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