Description
In game you play the role of Commander Keen: an eight year-old genius by the name of Billy Blaze, who builds an interstellar spaceship from his mom's vacuum cleaner. When Billy learns that the Earth is in danger, he dons his brother's football helmet to become Commander Keen -- Defender of the Earth!
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Trivia
The Commander Keen engine wasn't originally intended for Commander Keen. Tom Hall, creator of Commander Keen, recalls the first game made with the side-scrolling engine:
"The first game was actually a joke. It was called Dangerous Dave in 'Copyright Infringement.' (John) Carmack had just gotten a little guy to move around over a tile map, and I looked over at the Nintendo in the corner. I said, 'Wouldn't it be funny to make the first level of Super Mario 3...tonight?' Carmack smiled and said, 'Let's do it!' I copied the tiles pixel for pixel and made a map out of them while Carmack feverishly programmed the guy landing on ground tiles and getting coin tiles. At 5:30 in the morning, we dumped that on (John) Romero's desk and went home to crash. Romero played it all the next day, saying 'This could make so much money!' It was pitched to a friend of a friend at Nintendo, and they liked it so much, they wanted a demo. We added Mario graphics and Koopas and stuff, and sent it to them. It apparently got to the head guys at Nintendo, but they didn't want to enter the PC market.
Softdisk didn't want to use the smooth scrolling trick Carmack had discovered (since it didn't also work in CGA!), so we thought, well, if they don't want it, we could do something ourselves.... So we thought, hey, we'll make our own game. We needed a topic. I asked if they cared what topic-sci-fi, fantasy, whatever. I think Carmack mentioned a kid that saves the galaxy or something. I went off and fifteen minutes later, came back with the paragraph that you see in Keen 1. I read it in a Walter Winchell voice (he's a nasal 40s radio/newsreel announcer). Carmack clapped after I was finished, and we were off and running.
We got contacted by Scott Miller of Apogee, and once Keen was published, it was making enough for us to live on, so we quit and formed id."
Imagine what would have happened had id gone to work for Nintendo.
(by Fragmaster. Taken from ClassicGaming.com)
This entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
Tomer Gabel 
(4491) on Aug 14, 1999.
