I spent so many hours playing the first game as a kid, decoding the alphabet (which I would later discover it tells you how to read in episode 2 or 3 anyway), trying to get every last item, etc.
My favourite bit was the dark, fiery secret tunnel underneath one of the larger levels (http://www.commander-keen.com/levelmaps/1/013.gif), which teleports you to the city on the right-hand side of the world map at the bottom of the level maps page, not really visible from the map screen when going between the main cities... but I no longer remember which of these maps is that city, alas
(or maybe not alas: I hope I've put some more currently useful information in that part of my brain instead. Thanks for the nostalgia!)
We called it the Teddy Bear Maze, for its higher occurrence of teddy bears than other levels. Though looking at the layout now, I don't think it quite deserves the 'maze' designation as much as the Pepsi Maze does. But all those teddy bears...you could rack up a few extra lives if you managed to snag them all.
Looking at the levels, this one raises my curiosity: https://www.commander-keen.com/levelmaps/1/015.gif Note that there is a yellow keycard, but not a yellow door. I'm thinking either the level was never quite completed, or whoever took the screenshots to make these images took one after opening the yellow door. Reflecting on it now, I think perhaps the latter was the case, though I don't remember where the yellow door was. Either by one of the robots, or right before the drop out of the colored area.
Not sure if a mistake or red herring; probably the former but in a more tortuous level layout it would be kind of funny/cruel to make people work to get the green key to get the yellow key to get nowhere extra at all...
Thanks to khedoros1 for linking to the wiki, which has lots of good stuff on (and also lets you look at the level maps while the originally linked site is down): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656926
I too had a lot of fun decoding the language in Keen. Keen 5's victory sequence ended with a big message onscreen in keenspeak - I copied that down onto paper and worked out the alphabet from there.
It's not necessary to complete the level, and it's harder to notice when your screen doesn't have the resolution to see the whole thing at once, but it's interesting that it was released like this.
A few years ago Tom Hall almost accomplished to release the source code of 4-6 online, i still can't believe we lost it on the final step. So close yet so far :(
I've created a twitter account just to ask Tom about the progress.
I still have hopes of seeing commander keen released as software libre.
I remember having Commander Keen on my 486 and it was the first game where I realized the levels were stored in plain ascii. Changing the ascii values would directly change the level... I lost so many hours of my life to that!
They might be thinking of earlier Id software games. Some of those weren't compressed, and you could at least edit them with a hex editor pretty easily.
One of my colleagues recently fired up dosbox and showed me his old level editing tricks for a ton of DOS classics. I was mildly annoyed at my young self for having never considered trying this!
Similar simple edits often work on save file data from games of this era as well, and often don't need a hex editor etc.
Man oh man. I was born in '91; Keen has a special place in my heart.
I remember when my father — a field-service engineer for then Digital (more server hardware than anything software) — brought home an early release of Windows 95 from a MSFT buddy. It was around this time of year, 1995.
I managed to install it on whatever hardware we had laying around the house. Cool beans.
I took my father's pager and scrolled through, looking for the MSFT guy. I called him at 9am the next day. "Hi msft guy my name is joshmn I am guy-from-digital's son; I have a question about the operating system I have on this disk. Do you have a moment?"
I remember my mom standing in the kitchen saying "what are you doing joshmn?" "Mom please one moment I am talking to the msft guy"
She almost died laughing.
I explained my issue with Keen and sound. I can only imagine he was amused.
Luckily for me, his son had the same issue! It required a simple change in a text file somewhere, I can't remember where, but after an hour I finally figured it out.
Same guy traded a SEGA Genesis for a whopping 23" CRT a few years later.
My mom says I was a smart kid. Sure, maybe, but little does she know about how I couldn't find the second DOOM floppy for the installer. To replace it, I took a Windows 95 floppy, put a different sticker over it, and tried my hardest to write (physically, on the label) the same exact design/letters/words of the other DOOM floppy, changing the 1/x for 2/x.
I remember playing Commander Keen 4 demo a lot (I finished all the demo levels) then searching for a free version full download in google. (I used to do that a lot when I was younger.) somehow they never yielded any free versions or downloads.
The game was a blast. Then I played and completed Keen 1 when it was released as freeware. They felt like completely different games (Keen 4 is a lot bigger game than Keen 1 which is like Duke 1 compared to Nukem 2).
I still have all 6 of them (Older me now knows how to get full versions without the stupid google search terms) but I no longer play them though they still as good as they used to be.
I played most of the way through the 1st one recently, and some of the 4th. In the mid-90s, my friend gave me a pirated copy of one of them. Maybe Keen 5? Or Keen Dreams? It had one of the piracy-protection things where you have to name the enemy to get past, and I only knew the names of 2 enemies. I'd keep exiting and re-starting the game until I found one that I knew.
Captain Comic and Commander Keen were my Super Marios until about 1995, because we had a PC but no game consoles.
I got it for free, along with Jill of the Jungle, and Wolfenstein 3D, with a Gravis PC Gamepad back in the day. They all came on two floppies, I was amazed that so much content could go on two discs that I could carry with me.
Revelation: Today, it's amazing to me to have a 128GB ssd on my keychain.
I played Keen exclusively with a joystick for years and was pretty good at it. If you sat me down with the exact same joystick I could probably still play pretty well, but the much looser feel of a modern joystick would screw me up. When my brother and I would play Keen, we'd make the plastic on the joystick case creak from the frantic maneuvering!
Yes, that's the one! You could even screw this little stick into the d-pad and use it like a joystick, or like me, as a child you just broke it off in the hole and never told mom.
I very much enjoyed the speedruns of this game done by CapnClever on twitch. He has records on most official games and also has run some of the unofficial games.
It great to see someone running through levels I sweated blood and tears on as a kid.
Funny to hear that my brother and I aren't the only ones. We always played Captain Comic with me walking and jumping and him shooting (continuously). Neither of us were good enough to beat it alone as little kids.
Captain Comic 2 seems to be almost impossible to find a working copy of. It seems it had some sort of copy protection that when the files were copied it locked you out of a majority of the game.
It seems this would be trivial to get around, but there doesn't seem to be enough interest in the game to find any information on it.
You'd get to a certain point where there's a room with an NPC. It's impossible to get out of the room (too high to jump, you don't have the ability to fly yet). The NPC tells you that you're missing an important item. I got in touch with Michael Denio, the creator of Captain Comic, years later and he told me that the "important item" is the game itself (and was kind enough to offer to send me a physical copy of the game by himself).
I think it's one of the earliest examples of a game pretending to be properly cracked, yet ending up in an unwinnable state, misleading the crackers.
Interesting, thanks. By this point, I'll bet there's a page somewhere with the codes...in fact, the copy that I downloaded has a file "PROTCODE.TXT" with the codes to look up.
They look like they're just 16-bit values. It tells you to look up things like "A, 5". In the table, there are 16 letters (columns) and 128 numbers (rows). I'll bet it's just checked against some algorithm in the game code.
It's tough to see where some of the code comes from, though. The game copies chunks of the binary around within itself, and constructs function calls "by hand" (pushing a memory address byte-by-byte, then "returning" to it). It's not horrendous to trace, but more than a half-hour job for me.
Ah, such fond memories looking at these levels… This is where I learned my first command prompt skills – cd-ing through directories, dir /p-ing and running the various keen.exe programs :)
I played Keen 1 first, and Keen 4 a couple of years later. We might've had at least the first one before we even had Windows 3.1. I remember the clamshell package that shareware kinds of games used to be sold in, because after installing Keen4, that package sat on the hutch above the computer desk for a long time, and I touched it every time I reached up to turn on the speakers.
I knew about Keen Dreams at some point in my childhood. 2, 3, 5, and 6 were unknown to me for a long time (might've been in college in the early 2000s before I knew of them?)
As thekaleb mentioned the creator seems to reference this symbol a lot in his games. Here is more of a back story (after some google-fu of course as I'm not very familiar with the games)
Seems like Keen 5 has it as an easter egg to reference Wolfenstein [1].
And Wolfenstein uses it since the game has a "Nazi Party" within it (if you fight them or fight with them I'm not aware of) [2].
Interesting quote from [2] "The inclusion of the swastika led to the banning of the conventional game in Germany, as cultural stigma against the swastika is high there."
For reference the plot of Wolfenstein is that you are a captured soldier trying to escape from a Nazi controlled castle. You are fighting against the Nazis.
True but regardless of which one is technically correct, both pretty much share the same negative connotations now. I used to always hear people talking about how the swastika is really a sign of peace, but regardless of what it originally meant, it doesn't mean that anymore.
It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis to at least a billion people in India. I'd even bet that the majority of people around the world associate swastikas with non-Nazi stuff.
My favourite bit was the dark, fiery secret tunnel underneath one of the larger levels (http://www.commander-keen.com/levelmaps/1/013.gif), which teleports you to the city on the right-hand side of the world map at the bottom of the level maps page, not really visible from the map screen when going between the main cities... but I no longer remember which of these maps is that city, alas
(or maybe not alas: I hope I've put some more currently useful information in that part of my brain instead. Thanks for the nostalgia!)