A must read article :)
 

http://www.3drealms.com/keenhistory/

Played it years ago when I first got my 486. Still it was kinda lame compared to the current Amiga titles ;)

Ugh...I remember when this came out. It was during my IBM vs Amiga trials. I couldn't believe that this game was causing the fuss it was causing. It just made me appreciate my Amiga that much more.

I remember when the first CK came out and a friend of mine told me : "Have you played it allready, have you ?? It rocks, play it ...." and so I did :kill I wish I never had, cause it was really really bad :rolleyes

I went over to a friend's house once- he said he had something really cool to show me. He was an Amiga 500 user, BTW. When I get there, what do I see? A PC, with Commander Keen running! FILTHY TRAITOR! But anyway, I kept a smile on my face and said that Keen looked like a good game, which was a blatant lie. Honestly, the game looked just so boring and dull, and my friend seemed so proud of it. To tell you the truth, I wasn't just unimpressed with Keen and its shitty graphics and Adlib sound, but with the entire PC package, which was about a Pentium 1 100. As I said, my friend seemed so proud at owning the PC, but I couldn't see what was so good about it. As Twist said, it made me love my Miggy even more than I had before.

man I LOVED this game. great memories of this.

I liked only these parts with improved sound and graphics, first was too basic.

Ah, Commander Keen. The game was cute and all but like many other Apogee games at the time I looked at the EGA-like graphics, listened to the PC-Speaker sounds, played for a little bit and used to think: "Yeah, it's cute, but light-years behind what the Amiga can do".

Not many years later, Doom on a 486DX2@66MHz with an S3Trio SVGA, a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 and a CD-ROM drive would bring forth the eminent death of the Amiga... :( The PC won the computer wars. The machine with less soul, less character and more compatibility issues ended up winning. Alas...

I think I actually played CK4 before I played the first 3 games, then it was on with games 5 and 6. I liked the last one better. I was disappointed that "The Universe is Toast" didn't come to fruition. id was interested in Wolf3D instead.

Played it. Never finished it. Got bored.. then multiple episodes flooded the market. Lol

The same on the console markets - the crappier NES won over the Master System. The SNES won over the Mega Drive and the Gameboy won over the more advanced Game Gear and Atari Lynx. Most of the time its not the best that wins, but the one with the best marketing and the best games! Doom was a real killer to the Amiga. I remember a computer club with many Amigas and some PCs, that when young gamers saw Doom, they queued and WANTED to play it, because it was so realistic, compared to the childish Amiga and Sega games.

Lynx had many bad games.

If that's the bar then the Amiga was a shitty system, because it had tons of terrible games.

Thankfully that's not really how systems are measured, and the Lynx had a lot of really brilliant titles, many exclusive to the platform.

And what IMO is the best Shadow Of The Beast version anywhere.

someone needs to make a commander keen ISO for the cd32! ;o)

You are right Simon :)

Too bad, you must use the pogo stick. I hate it. It would've been much better without this "feature". It's so silly thing that you have to jump with a pogo in a sci-fi game for example on the Mars! Please someone make a pogo-stick-less-version for the Amiga! (or at least a hack version for PC)

The pogo stick is what differentiates Keen from any other generic platformer at the time. It is not mandatory to like every game out there you know. Apparently you don't like Keen. Not a problem.

Yeah, great game for the PC...
Yes, the graphics weren't Amiga quality.
Yes, the sound wasn't much of anything.
Yes, compared to the Amiga... I get that...
I had both systems back then. My Amiga was my main system, and I loved it.
But I would frequently help people upgrade their PCs (sometimes paid, other times not) and I almost always got to keep the parts that had been replaced.
So it didn't take long for me to be able to piece together a PC. Started with an XT.
Then I got a 286 (I think) "Inboard" (or something like that)... Had an amber monochrome monitor, and eventually got a cheap VGA one, etc...

And while Keen would have been a fun shareware/PD game on the Amiga, it was amazing on the PC... ;-)

I was always able to appreciate it in it's system...
Another thing that I think helped was that it was (at least to me) easier than most Amiga platformers...
So while lots of people called it boring, I found it "able for me to make progress."

There are a few games on the PC that I remember.
Of course, Wolf3D and Doom.
Jazz Jackrabbit...
And Commander Keen...

Crappy games like Keen made me happy I owned an Amiga.

The link in the first post (2002) is now dead but thanks to Archive.org (love those guys) it has been preserved.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130303...m/keenhistory/

I don't know if this is of interest to anyone but John Carmack has started his own company doing AGI (General AI) and what has he called the company??

Keen Technologies

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/st...28042959507457