Trivia / Commander Keen

• Creator Backlash:
  • Adrian Carmack apparently detested working on these games. He even placed four hanged Commander Keens in the second secret level of Doom II: Hell on Earth, that you have to gib in order to beat the level, as revenge for having to work on a Lighter and Softer video game series.
  • Tom Hall has flat-out stated that he despises the 2001 GBC game, and doesn't even count it as being part of the series. He also considers Keen Dreams to be the "lamest" of the Commander Keen games. He was definitely not too excited about the (eventually cancelled) mobile game, either, stating it didn't feel like a Keen game.
• Easter Egg:
  • In one level of episode 5, some pipework forms a swastika (a reference to the then-forthcoming Wolfenstein 3-D, although the swastika is actually the mirror-image of a Nazi swastika) and other pipework below it spells out the name of John Romero. In another level, pipework spells out the name of Tom Hall.
  • A secret reference that wasn't found for 25 years was revealed by Tom Hall on Twitter: Keen's CompuWrist is a modified Atari Lynx. The letters of the logo can just be seen, scratched out on the top, with the Atari logo scratched out at the bottom of the screen.
• Franchise Killer: While id Software was already becoming less and less interested in making Commander Keen games, especially after Tom Hall left the company in August 1993, many believe that the 2001 GBC game (with its poor sales and mixed reception) was the final nail in the coffin for the series. The announcement of the mobile Commander Keen game, eighteen years later, aimed to revert this, but it was quietly cancelled a year later after mostly negative reception.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The full version of the sixth game, Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter!. It's the only game not on Steam, where you can otherwise get the full series (including the Gaiden Game). This is because the sixth game was published by another company which has since gone under. ID was approched by FormGen to put out a retail title and decided to give them episode 6 and make it stand alone from the Goodbye Galaxy series, making it a two episode series where Apogee usually sold titles in sets of three.
• Orphaned Series: Although these games are a fairly enjoyable way to spend an afternoon if you're not busy, they were discontinued before a satisfactory conclusion could be reached, and a number of copyright hand-changes have made an official conclusion more or less defunct.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The sixth episode of the series, Aliens Ate My Babysitter!, has never had a modern rerelease due to the game’s publisher FormGen going defunct and the rights to the game being uncertain. For several years, Keen Dreams was also in a state of limbo due to not being owned by Apogee before finally getting licensed and rereleased in 2013.
• Vaporware: Despite having an animated trailer, the mobile game announced in 2019 appears to have been canceled in 2020. A Google Play Store listing for it exists, suggesting it at least made it to beta testing. The game is not available to download there though, and the reviews from people who actually DID play it were unanimously negative.
• What Could Have Been:
  • id tried to publish the first game through Softdisk, as they already had a contract with them. Softdisk rejected it because the game didn't work with CGA, but they did later publish Keen Dreams. The game also started life as a port of Super Mario Bros. 3, but Nintendo wasn't interested in MS-DOS games ^note Nintendo were impressed by what id had done but had already made the decision to focus on their own console. Both Nintendo and John Carmack have acknowledged this was the right decision. so id kept the game engine while creating their own content.
  • John Carmack once stated on Twitter that he had plans to develop a Commander Keen game for iOS devices, but nothing ever came of it before he left id Software. The Quietly Cancelled 2019 mobile game was made without him.
  • Carmack had once expressed interest in personally working on the Game Boy version with Romero and Tom Hall contributing to level design.
  • A mobile game by Bethesda Softworks was announced at E3 in 2019. The game would have taken place years after the original games, and focused on Billy's twin son and daughter, Billy Jr. and Billie. The numerous gameplay changes and pay-to-play nature were roundly eviscerated, and it was unceremoniously cancelled in June 2020, with Bethesda scrubbing practically every trace of it from their websites.
• Writing Around Trademarks: The game originally started as a Super Mario Bros. 3 clone for PCs. id tried to get Nintendo to distribute it, but they weren't interested, so they used the engine to create an original game.