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Presented for your listening pleasure is the first episode of the Retroquest podcast where Erron and I discuss the first Commander Keen game: Marooned on Mars. You can listen to or download the podcast directly from this page, or you can subscribe to the Retroquest feed with your podcatching software of choice.

This week’s podcast comes in at a little over twelve minutes.  We’ll be trying to keep all of our podcasts under the fifteen minute mark for future entries to save everyone’s time.  So give it a listen and let us know what you think!

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I’ve put the finishing touches on the first entry in the Retroquest series.  For those of you who weren’t around the blog when I introduced the series and then didn’t update it for months at a time, the premise is that I go back, play old games, and then talk about them for a little while.  It’s my hope that the series will add to the infamy of acknowledged classics, highlight some forgotten gems that may have been lost to time, and get in a few good jabs at deserving piles of crap.

Today’s entry falls under “forgotten gems.”  Anyone who was a gamer in the mid to late ’90s knows about id Software, John Carmack, and John Romero.  What most of those gamers probably don’t know, however, is that id Software and the dynamic duo got their start creating Commander Keen, the brainchild of game designer Tom Hall who was also a founding member of id.  Commander Keen introduced sidescrolling platforming to the PC thanks to a programming trick Carmack developed and the game went on to be the first big hit for id paving the way to financing for their later genre-defining work.

Unfortunately id has long since dropped all ties to Keen. A planned sequel that was due out in the winter of 1992 never materialized thanks to the success of Wolfenstein 3D that caused id to move their focus to first person shooters and the upcoming DOOM. The final nail in the coffin for most gamers came in a secret level of DOOM II that was a recreation of the final level from the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D.  To finish that level you had to kill four Keen doppelgangers that were tied up over the dimensional portal leading to the next level.  The message was clear: Keen was dead.

Commander Keen did return in a Gameboy Advance game that failed to be either a good game or a good seller.  Other than that the series has been sitting gathering dust on abandonware websites around the web, fondly remembered by the small group of PC gamers lucky enough to have played the series in its heyday but largely ignored by the gaming community at large.

Which is a real pity.  The first Keen trilogy, invasion of the Vorticons, was easily the equal to any sidescrolling platformer on the NES.  The games were a rare shining jewel in a PC shareware market that was overrun with poorly designed games looking to make a quick buck.  And the Goodbye Galaxy series was easily equal to Super Mario World, if not better in some respects.

So go check out the Retroquest entry for the Commander Keen series, and be sure to check out the new entry for Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars.

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My brother and I weren’t allowed to have a Nintendo when we were young.  The only time we got a crack at the gaming system of choice back in the late 80s and early 90s was at our babysitter’s house or when we were visiting friends, and even then the selection was usually limited to mainstays like the Mario games.  One friend of mine had a copy of Castlevania that we would play into the night, but that was the extent of our Nintendo experience.

Not that my parents were video game hating luddites.  Far from it.  The simple fact was that my dad had already invested in a 286 IBM Compatible PC, a good chunk of change in the mid-80s, and they weren’t going to spend any more money on a game system when we already had a computer.  Turns out we were in luck though.  While my friends were stuck in an 8-bit era dominated by the tyranny of mediocrity that was the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality we were already enjoying the benefits of the cutting edge of gaming design, including a now little-known game called Commander Keen.

Before id Was id:

Keen was the brainchild of the id Software dream team of Tom Hall, John Carmack, and John Romero before there was an id Software and before they were THE John Carmack and John Romero.  As legend has it, Hall, Carmack, and Romero were paying the bills by designing shareware software for Softdisk when, late one night, Carmack decided to program a smooth side-scrolling clone of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3.  This was no small feat at the time, having never been done on the PC platform before, and before you know it Hall, Romero, and Carmack rode off into the sunset, money signs in their eyes, to found id Software and go on to fabulous success in the gaming industry.

Except it wasn’t a simple drive down Easy Street for the two industry titans.  They had to work nights at Softdisk to get in any time on their own Keen project with no guarantee that any of their tinkering would ultimately pay off.  They first pitched their idea for a Mario clone to the people at Nintendo and were firmly declined by the big N.  Instead of accepting defeat, however, they decided that they’d just program their own new title.

Tom Hall's opener for Commander Keen.

Birth of a Hero

Commander Keen was born out of a combination of retro 1950s pulp science fiction, a desperate desire to break free of Softdisk, and the limitations of the contemporary computer video game industry.  Tom Hall dashed off a quick paragraph that eventually became the opening crawl for the first Keen Game: Marooned on Mars:

Billy Blaze, eight year-old genius, working diligently in his backyard clubhouse has created an interstellar starship from old soup cans, rubber cement and plastic tubing.  While his folks are out on the town and the babysitter has fallen asleep, Billy travels into his backyard workshop, dons his brother’s football helmet, and transforms into…

COMMANDER KEEN — Defender of Earth!

In his ship, the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket, Keen dispenses galactic justice with an iron hand!

The premise was simple.  An eight year old genius travels to exotic locales, meets interesting aliens, and fries most of them with his handy blaster.  The graphics were simple in the first three games, the mechanics were a little rough around the edges, and the difficulty level in the first trilogy quickly ramped up from simple and friendly for players who were trying out the first episode as a Shareware title to an insanely painful exercise in pain that only the most masochistic gamers could ever hope to enjoy, let alone complete, by the time the third installment rolled around.  Still, the first Keen trilogy was definitely more polished than the average sidescrolling platformer on the NES at the time, and even at its most cruel the games weren’t nearly as punishing or capricious as most contemporary console titles.

So this week on Retroquest I’ll be talking about Commander Keen, defender of the galaxy and singlehanded savior of id software before it was id software.  Without Commander Keen there wouldn’t have been enough money for Hall, Romero, and Carmack to leave Softdisk and start their own gaming company.  No Keen, no DOOM, no Quake, no id.  I’m sure that industry changing developments like the first person shooter still would have come along in their own time – series such as Marathon serve as proof enough that the concept of the FPS wasn’t a divinely inspired message from above sent exclusively to id – but it is certain that the history of gaming and the development of online gaming would have looked very different in a world without id.

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