Commander Keen

Commander Keen is a legend of PC history. In 1990 a young team around John Carmack, John Romero and Tom Hall showed with Keen that smooth, side-scrolling platforming - until then the domain of consoles like the NES - was possible on the PC too. The same minds would soon change the gaming world forever with Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM. Keen was their charming, colorful beginning.

You control Billy Blaze, who zooms through the galaxy in his big brother football helmet and a self-built spaceship. In the shareware episode Marooned on Mars, Keen is stranded on the red planet because nasty Vorticons have stolen parts of his ship. Your task: jump, climb, collect and retrieve the scattered components so Keen can fly home again - and incidentally save Earth from invasion.

The feel is pure retro platforming: precise jumps over deadly chasms, colorful alien worlds full of secrets, candy to collect for points, and enemies you take out with the raygun or deftly hop over. The famous pogo stick lets Keen jump especially high and is the key to many hidden corners. Anyone who explores the levels closely finds extra lives, bonus rooms and the odd nasty trap.

Controls are classic keyboard: the arrow keys to run, Ctrl to jump, Alt to use the pogo stick and Escape for the menu. That is the original DOS layout that millions of children knew by heart in the early nineties. For fully focused play there is a fullscreen mode.

Technically the game is powered by js-dos, a DOS emulator that runs entirely in the browser. The original shareware is loaded and executed in an emulated DOS environment - no download, no installation, no DOSBox setup. It is expressly the freely distributable shareware version that id Software released back then precisely to be passed around. No piracy gray area, but lived shareware culture.

Commander Keen in the browser is hands-on nostalgia and, for younger players, a look at the roots of the genre. Whether you had the game on a floppy disk as a child or are seeing it for the first time: the catchy controls and the charming pixel world grab you immediately. Open it, jump, rediscover the past.