Commander Keen

Commander Keen is the main character in a series of computer games developed by id Software in the early 1990s. The side-scrolling platformers are notable mainly for their pioneering use of EGA graphics and shareware distribution, and because of their developers' famous later products. The Commander Keen games were distributed by Apogee Games.

The Keen games were exciting to the games community in their day for the revolutionary new graphics engine written by John Carmack. Commander Keen was a very successful attempt at replicating the side-scrolling action of Super Mario Bros in MS-DOS.

Seven official Commander Keen games exist for the PC. They are:

Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons

1. Marooned on Mars (first released on as shareware on December 14 1990)

2. The Earth Explodes

3. Keen Must Die!

The "Lost Episode"

3.5 Keen Dreams (distributed by Softdisk, not Apogee)

Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy!

4. Secret of the Oracle (first released as shareware on December 15 1991)

5. The Armageddon Machine

Commander Keen Special Edition

6. Aliens Ate My Babysitter (distributed by FormGen, who resold it to Apogee; now discontinued)

Some years after the above episodes, Activision released a new Commander Keen game for the Game Boy Color. It was simply called Commander Keen.

The character popped up in a cameo in a secret level (number 32) of DOOM II, a later id product.

Commander Keen has also made cameo appearances in many other Apogee games, including Bio Menace, Paganitzu, and Crystal Caves.

External links

• A Look Back at Commander Keen, from 3DRealms. "This article tells the story of Commander Keen - how it was made, what the people behind it felt, and some things you may never have known before about the game."
• Download site for some free Keen demos
• The Standard Galactic Alphabet, a substitution cipher used to hide text such as hints and warnings in the game.