Anyone remember Commander Keen?

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Polish Ninja

Limp Gawd
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I found several threads where people talk about first getting into PC gaming because of Wolf3d (1992), Doom (1993), and Duke 3d (1996), but who here was a hardcore PC gamer before those games came out? I bet I spent more time when I was a kid playing the original Commander Keen (1990) than I spend playing CSS and BF2 now. Crystal Caves (1991) and Battletech: the Crescent Hawk's Inception (1988) also come to mind. What other pre Wolf3d games can yall think of that were as awesome as Commander Keen?
 
Commander Keen was the first pc game i ever played, period. I played that game for hours on end, for months.

The games I first initially started playing was Commander Keen, an Apogee game with monsters and a little kid. I think it was called Monster Bash or something. It was incredibly bloody. Than the original Pirates! and Das Boot.

man those were the days. The OS wasn't even windows3.1, it was Geoware or something along those lines. Damn I'm gonna have to do some research on all that.
 
I didn't end up owning a computer until about '94-96 or so (shortly after gradeschool) (it's all a blur, all i know is I started on win 3.11, I keep track based on OSes not years), but i often went to my friends' houses that did. My buddy played that game all the time but never let me play the damn thing. He also had a couple of other games which I can't remember if they were apogee or not, one was something like Hocus Pocus which he was always playing too. I got to watch but the selfish jerk never let me play, I mean, I would never turn out to be like that once I got a computer. :p
 
I used to play all the free Commander Keen games. I was a little kid so I couldn't afford the non-free ones, but I remember the first one on mars where you get the pogo stick, then there was that one where you crash-land on a weird planet and have to save the seven wise men ... there was also one in vegetable world but that wasn't as much fun.

Those games were the best--I wish current games were that much fun!

Ah... memories :)
 
Yep.

Dopefish, All I gotta say. I can't forget that stupid fish lol Swim, swim, hungry!


Back when gameplay was better then graphics.
 
lol, I used to play a lot of Blake Stone and Wolf 3D when they came out....
 
http://www.3drealms.com/games.html

If you scroll down a ways to older games there's info on all of these, including minimum system requirements.

min. req. for Crystal Caves:

XT Computer (286 or higher recommended)
450k of conventional memory
EGA Graphics
560k of Hard Drive Space (for shareware)
1.7 meg of Hard Drive Space (for registered)
Joysticks Optionally Supported

Heh, what's an "XT computer"?
 
The XT was an IBM model (or series?), the followup to the original IBM PC. Intel 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU (8-bit bus, 16bit internally), 128kb ram, (8-bit) ISA.
 
I used to play this commodore 64 game where you had to save some ducks from a hippo that wanted to eat them using little red boats, cant remember the name now tho
 
Hah yes, I forgot about Commander Keen games.

Anyone remember Day of the Tentacle? The second Manian Mansion game. I remember really enjoying it and wishing they made more.
 
Well the first PC game I ever played was on an Apple computer like in 1979 :eek:

However my first computer was a trusty 286 that played commander keen in stunning EGA graphics. There was no web so I had to use Gopher and BBS' to find game info and files.

Sigh, such simple times :D
 
Battletech: the Crescent Hawk's Inception

I played that on my C-64C. God that was a good game. Still have the game and my C-64C.
 
Wasn't Commander Keen also on the Turbo Duo?? I'm clearing out some cob webs here thinking back to those days.
 
The first computer game I played was Winter Games for Commodore 64. That game was awesome! Especially the Hot Dog event.

I loved Crystal Caves and Commander Keen. I used to play around in MS Paint for hours back then.

Does anyone remember Relentless: Twinsens Odyssey? That game was hard, but had the best graphics.
 
PRIME1 said:
Well the first PC game I ever played was on an Apple computer like in 1979 :eek:

However my first computer was a trusty 286 that played commander keen in stunning EGA graphics. There was no web so I had to use Gopher and BBS' to find game info and files.

Sigh, such simple times :D
Click to expand...

I'm almost in the same boat. My first PC gaming experience was on an Apple ][e. Crisis Mountain, Wizardry, Choplifter, Lunar Lander, Infiltrator, Wolfenstein, Lode Runner, and of course Zork. The best was when the parents would occasionally let me hook it upto the tv instead of that green monitor. .. brings back memories. BRUN and CATALOG :D

First x86 PC was a Zeos 386sx-16mhz - 2mb ram, 40MB hard drive. Then I got into games like Wolf3d, Retaliator, and BBS door games on a 2400bps modem. LORD and Tradewars2000 FTW! :D
 
My dad had a coworker that hooked my brother and I with all six episodes (he had already beaten them). That was back around 1993, and was the first game that I remember. I went back and played all the demos again last year, as I couldn't find the floppies :(
 
so_cal_forever said:
Yep, Commander Keen was awesome. I also enjoyed Raptor around the same time.
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ditto. both raptor and commander keen were awesome games
 
Met-AL said:
Battletech: the Crescent Hawk's Inception

I played that on my C-64C. God that was a good game. Still have the game and my C-64C.
Click to expand...
HOLY HELL. Now that's going back. I used to have that game on my C-64 as well.

Damn, the memories of the Commodore and Q-Bert.
 
the first games i played were commander keen and crystal caves..

Billy Blaze and Milo Steamwitz FTW!!
 
Holy moly, Commander Keen had me addicted to video games since I was about 3ish. Name another game that involves collecting candy while saving the galaxy on a pogo stick. If I recall I called the end doors in Keen 1-3 "Baskibokers" from the funky sounds they'd made. My parents had it cheap for a while, giving me shareware of every apogee game past Raptor.
 
commander keen and the original duke nukem, those as well as reader rabbit when I was 4 or 5 I would play alot on my grandparents business computer.
 
Haha, I remember buying the shareware version of Commander Keen at Radio Shack :D
I played a lot of this and Castles... although I was like... 9 at the time and sucked horribly at the game.
 
First "computer" game I played was WordMuncher on those ancient Macs. You know, the ones with the black and green screens! For a classroom learning game, that game was awesome and addicting! :D
 
Polish Ninja said:
I found several threads where people talk about first getting into PC gaming because of Wolf3d (1992), Doom (1993), and Duke 3d (1996), but who here was a hardcore PC gamer before those games came out? I bet I spent more time when I was a kid playing the original Commander Keen (1990) than I spend playing CSS and BF2 now. Crystal Caves (1991) and Battletech: the Crescent Hawk's Inception (1988) also come to mind. What other pre Wolf3d games can yall think of that were as awesome as Commander Keen?
Click to expand...
I have all of the keen games and still play them from time to time.
 
sethmo said:
First "computer" game I played was WordMuncher on those ancient Macs. You know, the ones with the black and green screens! For a classroom learning game, that game was awesome and addicting! :D
Click to expand...
Nothing better then getting 41,000 points in one hour. Number munchers that is.
 
sethmo said:
First "computer" game I played was WordMuncher on those ancient Macs. You know, the ones with the black and green screens! For a classroom learning game, that game was awesome and addicting! :D
Click to expand...

OH! I had completely forgot about those learning games! (edutatinment?)

StickyBear is the one I remember.
StickyBear Math
 
I was about to shake my cane in the air at you darn young whippersnappers and say my first computer games were the ones I typed in the code from a book for a TRS-80 (Model I, Lvl 2, 16k!)...no, I guess that's right. I was going to say playing Hunt the Wumpus on teletypes at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, but since that was neither a PC nor something I could just play any time I wanted, I guess I won't count it. Sigh, late 30s and I'm practically ancient. :)
 
I loved commander keen, my aunt would subscribe to some catalog order, which would send her monthly disks (51/4 and eventually 31/2 inch disks) it came with all the commander keens and hocus pocus, and blakestone and dukenukems.

I cannot for the life of me remember the name of this game, but it was a racing game, you were a kind of like a spacecraft that floated, and you would gather up speed and get faster and faster while jumping from platform to platform. moving left and right, the faster you got, the longer you could jump.you didn't race against anyone or even a clock, instead you just gathered points and saw how far you could get. I really wish they made a flash game of that or something, does anyone remember the name of it? I believe it was back when the first dukenukem came out.
 
Duke Nukem series (platform), Crystal Caves, Secret Agent.....all Apogee. I lived in the Dallas area at the time and remember running over to the non-descript Apogee studios in Garland to buy some of their games. We all take online credit card purchase and downloads for granted these days....way back when, that stuff hadn't happened yet. Those platforms were great to play and Apogee made some good ones.
 
Man, all of this makes me miss raptor: call of the shadows (I swear I beat this game 50 times when i was in first grade)
 
I remember Keen, was that around the same time as Sopwith? That's the other one of that vintage that sticks out in my mind.

I was playing games like that on a 386DX-16 with a math co-processor and 1 MB RAM. My mom was so proud of her math co-processor, which cost around $400-500 or so at the time.
 
Concillian said:
I remember Keen, was that around the same time as Sopwith? That's the other one of that vintage that sticks out in my mind.

I was playing games like that on a 386DX-16 with a math co-processor and 1 MB RAM. My mom was so proud of her math co-processor, which cost around $400-500 or so at the time.
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LOL, math co-processor. Funny how so much is so easily forgotten. I was jealous of the math co-processor crowd.
 
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