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Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons is a 1990 game by id Software.

Plot

Billy Blaze is an eight-year-old boy genius who has constructed a spaceship in his backyard from old soup cans and other household objects, called The Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket. When his parents are out and the babysitter falls asleep, he dons his brother's Packers helmet and becomes Commander Keen, Defender of Earth.

In this game, Keen is exploring on Mars when aliens steal four spaceship components that he must get back. The aliens are the Vorticons, a fierce dog-humanoid race that had an outpost on Mars. Keen travels through different Martian cities, and eventually recovers all the missing parts. However, when Keen gets back to Earth, he finds the Vorticon mothership looming over the planet, with its cannons ready to attack. In the second game, Keen infiltrates the mothership and has to disable each of the Tantalus Rays targeting different Earth cities. During this adventure, Keen learns that the Vorticons used to be a peaceful race, but were enslaved by the mysterious Grand Intellect.

After disabling the cannons, Keen travels to the Vorticon homeplanet, Vorticon VI. In the third game, Keen has to face the Vorticon masses in their cities, all ready to kill Keen. After fighting through many levels of Vorticon-infested cities and military installations, Keen arrives at the lair of the Grand Intellect. There he discovers that the leader of the Vorticons is actually his school rival Mortimer McMire. In the final level, Keen has to disable the "Mangling Machine", a large apparatus with many crushing parts controlled by Mortimer. Keen eventually defeats Mortimer and frees the Vorticons.

Gameplay

In Invasion of the Vorticons, the player can walk left and right on the screen, and jump to get on higher platforms. Some of these are semi-solid and can be jumped through from below. In the first game the player finds a pogo stick, which he can use for a continuous jump. This makes Keen harder to control, but allows the player to jump twice as high if he presses the jump button at the right moment. Keen keeps the pogo stick for the rest of the series.

The player will find an alien ray gun, which he can use to fire slow moving projectiles straight left or right to kill enemies. Some enemies die after one shot, some after more, and others are impervious to the ray gun. Unlike similar platform games like Bio Menace, the hero does not have a health bar. If Keen touches an enemy, he immediately loses a life. Enemies include Martians (in episode 1), and Vorticon or Vorticon-related creatures (in all three episodes). See Vorticon for details on most of the enemies. There are also several hazards in the games that will kill the player when touched, such as fire and acid.

Items found in the levels include:

• Rayguns and Charges: Provide additional shots.
• Score Items: Usually in the form of sugary foods and beverages, these items give Keen varying amounts of points (from 100 to 5000 points). The items worth the most points are generally difficult to access. Collecting enough (20000 points) will get the player another life.
• Colored Keycards: Red, yellow, green, and blue cards open doors with corresponding colors, and are usually necessary to collect to complete a level.

The second episode introduces moving platforms which can transport Keen, and switches which usually extend bridges over gaps in the floor. Some switches are light switches which can be used to turn off the light, making some enemies afraid to jump. The third game includes a power-up in the form of an ankh which acts as a temporary god mode.

While travelling between levels, Keen is viewed from above on a map; this is the only place where the player can save the game. Some of the levels are optional and can be skipped. Episodes 1 and 3 contain a secret level which is not easily accessible.

Development

John D. Carmack, a game programmer at Softdisk, discovered a trick that would allow smooth-scrolling graphics in PC games, but only with the 16-color EGA graphics card. Carmack and his Softdisk colleague Tom Hall kept the technology from Softdisk and used their own time to put together a clone of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3, except for the hero, which they replaced with Dangerous Dave, a character from John Romero's games for Softdisk. They called their creation Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. After Romero saw their demo in action, he and Jay Wilbur, project chief at Softdisk, suggested that they finish the Mario clone. The team then created a perfect PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3 in a week and approached Nintendo with their creation, who declined to enter the PC market at that time, but did congratulate the team for their efforts.

John Romero was later contacted by Scott Miller of Apogee, who, after seeing some of id's work, advanced the team $2,000 for the development of Commander Keen, starting a profitable business relationship that would last until id Software self-published Doom.

The first trilogy, Invasion of the Vorticons, was completed in three months. After developing it the team left Softdisk to form id Software. However, the developers of id had a contract with Softdisk requiring them to write several more games, one of which became Keen Dreams. Keen Dreams is sometimes referred to as "Keen 3.5", "Keen 7", or the "Lost Episode", as it was never distributed by Apogee.

References

1. Kushner, D. (2003). Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. Random House. ISBN 0-37-550524-5
2. "A Look Back at Commander Keen", 3D Realms Website, December 14, 2000. Retrieved on October 15, 2006.

• 1990 video games
• DOS games
• Commander Keen