Commander Keen in Keen Dreams
| Commander Keen in Keen Dreams | |
|---|---|
Title screen
|
|
| Developer(s) | id Software |
| Publisher(s) |
|
| Designer(s) | Tom Hall |
| Programmer(s) | |
| Artist(s) | Adrian Carmack |
| Series | Commander Keen |
| Platform(s) | Android, Linux, Windows, MS-DOS, OS X |
| Release |
MS-DOS
|
| Genre(s) | Side-scrolling platformer |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Commander Keen in Keen Dreams is a side-scrolling platform video game developed by id Software and published by Softdisk in 1991 for DOS. It is the fourth episode of the Commander Keen series. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, in an adventure in his dreams as he journeys through a vegetable kingdom to defeat the evil potato king Boobus Tuber and free enslaved children from the Dream machine. The game features Keen running and jumping through various levels while opposed by various vegetable enemies; unlike the prior three episodes, Keen does not use a pogo stick to jump higher, and throws flower power pellets to temporarily turn enemies into flowers rather than shooting a raygun to kill them.
After the success of Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, the developers of the game, including programmers John Carmack and John Romero, designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack, left their jobs at Softdisk to found id Software. As part of a settlement for using company resources to make their own game, the group agreed to make several games for Softdisk's Gamer's Edge subscription service. As a part of fulfilling this obligation, id made Keen Dreams as a prototype to develop ideas for their next major Keen game, Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy. These ideas included gameplay changes, graphical enhancements like parallax scrolling, and artistic improvements. Keen Dreams was not as widely played or noted as the other Keen games, and as it was owned by Softdisk was included in only one of the several compilation releases of the series by id or regular publisher Apogee Software; as a result, it became known as the "lost episode" of the series. In 2013 a port was developed by Super Fighter Team for Android devices, and a 2014 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign led to the original source code being published and a release by Hard Disk Publishing through Steam for Microsoft Windows and Linux in 2015, and OS X in 2016.
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