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by notafraudster 1205 days ago
It is incomplete.

There are 7 Commander Keen core games: a trilogy (Invasion of the Vorticons, Keen 1-3), a duology (Goodbye, Galaxy, Keen 4-5), and two standalone games (Aliens Ate My Babysitter, Keen 6 and Keen Dreams, Keen 3.5). The complete pack includes Invasion of the Vorticons and Goodbye, Galaxy, which gives you five of the seven.

Aliens Ate My Babysitter has never been commercially rereleased and is owned by Softdisk, not iD Software

Keen Dreams was -- believe it or not -- bought at auction by a kid named Javier Chavez who didn't know anything about programming or games and subsequently got himself permanently banned from Steam after posting a bunch of alt-right political stuff (!) and eventually changing his developer username to contain homophobic insults against the guy who owns Steam. He also released a reskin of the open source Hovertank 3D that changed the plot to be about killing refugees.

You can see some documentation of the above (note: obviously this has insults, slurs, homophobia, insulting people by calling them Jews, etc.)

  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1100869421336268813
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1141540162679316481
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1145771721162723328
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1344739372105654273
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1437721497221713923
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1437723155704029185
Anyway, after he was banned from Steam, the company Nightdive Studios initially reached an agreement with him to transfer ownership to them. They released a more technically polished version on Steam. At some point he began to contest their licensing arrangement and he had the game pulled again. There is a Switch release licensed by him.

If you want to buy Keen Dreams from him, you can do so at https://www.keendreams.com/, knowing you are giving money to the person I described above. You might notice that the "About us" page reads "We’re a small team of independent devs with a huge liking for older and unappreciated games, who took it upon us to re-release them to new players to enjoy! Look out for our releasr of Keen Dreams soon to be succeeded by more!" or that the main page features an incredibly JPEG artifacted low resolution image of the title screen and other gems like "Commander Keen keen dreams was considered the “lost episode” of Commander Keen, a franchise of 2d side scrolling games developed by id software decades ago." [sic] or "Smooth as butter 60fps gameplay, after all 30fps that’s so next gen consoles…" [sic]

So, that's the sad fate of Keen Dreams.

2 comments

Right, I'm not speaking against GOG or id Software. They run businesses and it seems like a totally reasonable decision to exclude these. Doesn't change the fact though, that it is good to have the original releases properly archived.

It's not really a new situation. We've dealt with tons of cases like this and generally decided that it's not a good idea to remove media from history because we've found their authors to be horrible people. Contexts, like the one you described, should only add to the history, not remove from it.

Oh hey, I remember hearing about that kid, he iirc also DMCAed a bunch of people giving him negative coverage if I'm not mistaken (but I could be). I'm surprised id Software didn't actually DMCA that reskin, Hover Tank 3D is GPLed and as far as I can tell, he never actually acquired the license, nor did he release the source.

Here's hoping Nightdive can figure something out, their development of the system shock remake looks very promising, I think they'd be good stewards for that kinda thing.