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December 14th, 2015 
Carl Williams 
What do you do when you have spent a lot of money and time creating a pretty damn good rendition of Super Mario Bros 3 but for PC? First, you shop it out to Nintendo and when they say no, you take your superior engine and rework the graphics and levels to make something new and unique. This is exactly what John Romero and the rest of the team at IFD (soon to become id Software) did with their PC rendition of Super Mario Bros 3. Nintendo, of course, said no to the port and Romero and the team had to do something so they reworked things and created another iconic classic called Commander Keen. This all happened at the tail end of 1990, 25 years ago, folks.
Command Keen was alone on computers.
Commander Keen was quite a change of pace from the demo of Super Mario Bros 3. This is probably to help distance the port from Nintendo’s intellectual property. What we got in Commander Keen is still a classic platforming title that showed PC gamers that DOS could do more than we were being led onto believe. There is an overhead map between levels, 2D sidescrolling action platforming centric levels with enemies. You can jump on the enemies or avoid them and collect lots of things. Quite similar to the basics of Super Mario Bros 3 on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Early episodic gaming
The story of Commander Keen is told through eight separate releases. Seven of these appeared on DOS for PC’s while the eighth is exclusive to the Game Boy Color. Id Software has kept the Commander Keen series alive and well on modern platforms through compilation releases. These releases have appeared on physical media and on digital distribution services such as Steam.
Familiar names worked on Commander Keen
Commander Keen is a classic series that most hardcore retrogaming fans know quite well. We would like to thank John Carmack, John Romero and Tom Hall for their work on Commander Keen.
Grab Commander Keen on Ebay, on Steam or with Prime from Aamzon and enjoy a true classic.
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This article is archived in the Hive Gaming section of the Hive.blog Blockchain. Check it out for more great entertainment.
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[…] It seems that John Romero, John Romero and Tom Hall were quite the game development team. While working for Softdisk they created a pretty impressive version of Super Mario Bros 3 for DOS. They obviously didn’t finish it because Nintendo was not interested in purchasing the code and releasing it. Reportedly they had congratulatory comments for the feat but were only interested in Mario being available on Nintendo bred hardware. This left the young team with only one of two choices. Trash the code was one, which they didn’t go with. Second was to rework things and create an original title, which they did- this is how Commander Keen came about (covered here on Retro Gaming Magazine). […]
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