 |
Release Date: 1990
Platform: PC Developer: id Software Publisher: Apogee License: Shareware Availability: Download Here Series: Commander Keen Series |
Plot:
Commander Keen Episode 1: Marooned on Mars introduced the world to 8 year old boy genius Billy Blaze who, after constructing an interstellar spaceship from parts scavenged from his parent’s garage, dons his brothers football helmet to become Commander Keen.
Tom Hall jotted off this quick plot summary in a few minutes and read it back to Carmack and Romero in the style of a '40s radio announcer. Try it yourself. It's fun.
Marooned on Mars finds our hero trapped on the red planet where parts from his ship, the Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket, have been stolen by an alien race known as the Vorticons. Keen must battle his way through Martian cities teeming with deadly robots, menacing martians, and the occasional Vorticon to reconstruct his ship and reach home before his parents realize he’s gone.
Gameplay:
Commander Keen follows the tropes of the contemporary platformer. Expect a lot of jumping and collecting items for points that yield extra lives at certain scores. Despite these traditional platformer tropes, however, Commander Keen manages to transcend other console platformers of the day with tight controls and excellent level design that requires skill to master without ever feeling arbitrarily difficult.
Players navigate through levels in Marooned on Mars via an overworld map that allows players to play through all of the levels in any order they please with a few exceptions. Levels are laid out on the overworld in such a way that players are guided from the easiest at the beginning to hardest towards the end, but it is possible to go directly to the five levels required to beat the game right away.
The pogo stick opened up new areas to exploration. Marooned on Mars was the only Commander Keen game where the pogo stick had to be found rather than coming as a standard inventory item.
Two defining aspects of the Keen experience are the raygun and pogostick. Every enemy in the game kills Commander Keen in one hit and there are no rings or powerups to give players an extra chance if they screw up. Moving through such a dangerous environment makes the raygun, which allows players to blast anything that moves into fried oblivion, a necessity. The raygun has limited ammo that can be replaced in increments of five by finding guns placed around levels and is far more accurate and fun to wield than the jump attacks common to platformers of the time.
The pogo stick isn’t necessary to beat the first game, but it does open up levels in Commander Keen. There is a substantial vertical element to the level design throughout the Keen series that players won’t fully experience without this bouncing gem. Performing the “impossible pogo trick” by hitting the jump and pogo buttons at the same time allows players to soar over enemies and up to new unexplored areas. While it is possible to complete Marooned on Mars without picking up the pogo stick, the experience will be much more difficult and far less satisfying.
Legacy:
Commander Keen was the first game to introduce smooth sidescrolling to the PC thanks to a programming trick developed by now legendary game programmer John Carmack. That technical feat would be enough on its own to earn Commander Keen a spot as a footnote in the annals of video game history, but more importantly this is the game that launched the careers of John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall as well as the fledgling id Software.
Many gamers early on thought that Apogee, not id, was the studio that designed Commander Keen rather than simply a distributor. The designers at id left their calling card all over the game in items stacked like in this screenshot.
Without Commander Keen it’s possible that id Software might never have gotten off the ground. Without id Software there would be no Wolfenstein, DOOM, or Quake. Without those games the nascent world of online gaming and professional gaming organizations might have gotten a late start. And we’d miss out on all the wonderful cell phone games John Romero made in the early ’00s. Well, maybe the last part wouldn’t have been such a great loss, but at the very least we would have missed out on a few good Romero-themed Penny Arcade comics from the same time period.
id Software is undeniably the house that Keen built. Without Commander Keen it’s very likely that talented game designers like Hall, Carmack, and Romero would have found their way to success through another title, but this game was the one that put them on the gaming radar for the first time.
Availability:
Marooned on Mars was distributed under a Shareware license and as such is still available today free of charge on many abandonware websites. I’ve provided a link to the game hosted at Commander-Keen.com at the top of this page as well. Please note that you may have to use an emulator such as DOSBox to get the game to run properly. A tutorial on setting up DOSBox on your computer can be found here.
Comments
Leave a comment Trackback