Before Quake, before Doom, and even before Wolfenstein 3D, the folks at id Software became famous for creating one of the most iconic platformer characters on PC: Commander Keen. Billy Blaze, a sort of hybrid between "Dexter" and "Jimmy Neutron", saved us for years from relentless alien invasions, armed only with his laser gun and endless ingenuity. CloneKeen is nothing more than an open-source version of the first game, but to make it work you'll need the original files from the shareware version.
The Origins of Commander Keen
In late 1990, designer Tom Hall teamed up with programmer John D. Carmack. Together they shaped what would become the first episode of "Commander Keen in the Invasion of the Vorticons". Its shareware distribution made young Keen hugely popular, and his adventures expanded over several more episodes, involving more aliens, a constant battle against his school's archnemesis, and even the rescue of his babysitter.
Those who played Doom 2 will remember a special level with four hanged bodies. Those are none other than representations of Commander Keen, as an "easter egg". Anyone interested in reliving Keen's adventures can now do so on Steam, where you can buy the first three episodes for just a handful of dollars.
CloneKeen: The Open-Source Alternative
The alternative, of course, is to find a way to play the title without falling into illegality. That's how we find CloneKeen, an open-source reproduction of the original game. Even the Steam edition is based on a specially configured DOSBox environment to run the title, but with access to the code, you can make the necessary modifications to run CloneKeen the way you want, or even port it to other platforms. Of course, this requires programming knowledge that not all players have, but if you've compiled a program or two in the past, you'll certainly find it interesting.
Speaking of compilation, all that's available on the official site is the program's code—no "build" to run directly on Windows. We're still not sure why there are no Windows binaries available, but it seems like a very bad decision. On the other hand, CloneKeen requires several files from the original game. In the download section for the code, you can find a copy of the original shareware from which to extract the files, but this dependency on original files makes us wonder just how re-created the game really is.
Commander Keen is a game that even today is easy to recommend; it remains as fresh and fun as it was back then. But the technical details you need to resolve to play CloneKeen might be too many for the average user. Still, it's good to know this option exists. Want more open-source adaptations of classic games? Play FreeSynd and OpenTTD.
https://old.neoteo.com/la-historia-de-los-juegos-shareware/
