35 years ago today, Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons - Episode 1: Marooned on Mars was released. This DOS game might be somewhat lost in the sands of time, obscured by stellar PC gaming achievements soon to follow, but its success was important as it led directly to the establishment of id Software. You know, the folks behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and other beyond-seminal 3D FPS titles.
The theme topic of this first Commander Keen title isn’t really important. What was groundbreaking at the time was John Carmack’s development of smooth scrolling on PCs – something of a challenge in the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) era. This side-scrolling engine was originally designed for a Super Mario Bros. 3 port to PC, but Nintendo didn’t bite, leading to the release of this brand-new game IP as a technology vehicle/showcase.
You can still buy it, or try the game online via DOSBox.
Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons - Episode 1: Marooned on Mars used Carmack’s ‘adaptive tile refresh’ EGA engine to good effect and, released via the Apogee shareware model, was an immediate success. Wikipedia notes that Apogee’s monthly sales were about $7,000 a month when they took on Commander Keen, but this title raked in $30,000 in its first two weeks of release, and within six months was providing regular receipts of $60,000 per month.
The snowballing success of this first title gave John Carmack and fellow developers like John Romero the confidence to leave their day jobs at Softdisk and set up Ideas from the Deep. That company would soon be restyled into the legendary id Software.
From this stratospheric success with a 2D side-scroller platforming adventure trilogy (1990 and 1991), the dev team rapidly embraced the possibilities of 3D rendering in software that only the most modern processors could provide. In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D would break onto the scene to establish id Software as a genre-creating game development powerhouse. A year later, Doom was released.
These early, aspirational, and popular 3D FPS games arrived during an era of rapid change in PC hardware – the 486 to Pentium changeover. Such was the overwhelming popularity and novelty of 3D gaming at the time that the PC would crush the diverse home computer scene, and give rise to dedicated 3D graphics cards like the legendary 3dfx Voodoo series, followed by ATI 3D Rage, nVidia RIVA 128, and PowerVR hardware.
Having slipstreamed the PC 3D gaming industry boom, Nvidia would go on to release the ‘first GPU’ the GeForce 256, at the end of the 1990s. It was no coincidence that one of the first games to make use of the first Direct3D 7–compliant accelerator with hardware transform & lighting would be Quake III Arena, by id Software.
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