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108-739: Invasion of the Vorticons was the only game developed by Ideas from the Deep, and was based on programmer John Carmack 's creation of adaptive tile refresh , a technique that allowed IBM-compatible general-purpose computers to replicate the smooth scrolling of video game consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System . The game's success caused designer Tom Hall , programmers John Carmack and John Romero , and artist Adrian Carmack to found id Software. Their obligations to Softdisk, where they had worked during development of

216-414: A fire pole ) is a pole that firefighters slide down to quickly reach the ground floor of a fire station . This allows them to respond to an emergency call faster, as they arrive at the fire engine faster than by using a standard staircase. In the 1870s, answering an alarm, Chicago fireman George Reid decided to use the long-pole the company employed to lift horse's hay from the upper-loft to slide to

324-458: A writing system used to depict alien languages in the galaxy throughout the series, is used for textual signs and directions and was created by Tom Hall beginning with Invasion of the Vorticons as a way to pass hidden messages to players. It is a substitution cipher to the Latin alphabet, including the letters A–Z, opening and closing quotation marks, and a full stop. In 2019, it was added to

432-642: A ZeniMax lawsuit against Oculus' parent company, Facebook , claiming that Oculus stole ZeniMax's virtual reality intellectual property . The trial jury absolved Carmack of liability, though Oculus and other corporate officers were held liable for trademark, copyright, and contract violations. In February 2017, Carmack sued ZeniMax, claiming the company had refused to pay him the remaining $ 22.5 million (~$ 27.5 million in 2023) owed to him from their purchase of id Software. In October 2018, Carmack stated that he and ZeniMax had reached an agreement and that "Zenimax has fully satisfied their obligations to me", ending

540-456: A different publisher and schedule Aliens Ate My Babysitter was developed after "Secret of the Oracle" but before "The Armageddon Machine"; the fifth episode, however, was created within one month. Another trilogy of episodes, titled The Universe Is Toast , was planned for December 1992; id worked on it for a couple of weeks, before shifting focus to Wolfenstein 3D (1992). Hall proposed reviving

648-426: A direction and have a team actually stick to it." Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful and disruptive innovation . He compares this approach to the "magic of gradient descent " where small steps using local information result in the best outcomes. According to Carmack, this principle is proven by his own experience, and he has observed this in many of

756-467: A few months away—split into three parts to match Apogee's shareware model of giving away the first part for free to attract interest in the whole. Hall suggested a console-style platformer in the vein of Super Mario Bros. , as they had the technology made for it; he further recommended a science fiction theme, and developed a short introduction that convinced the team to make Commander Keen in Invasion of

864-619: A final release date for any game he was developing. Instead, when asked for a release date on a new game, Carmack would usually reply that the game would be released "when it's done". Employees at Apogee , in their past years the publishers of games by id Software, adopted this business practice as well. In 2019, as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience , Carmack stated that his beliefs have changed over time: "I largely recant from that now." On Rage 's 6-year development time he says: "I think we should have done whatever it would have taken to ship it 2 years earlier". Carmack also reflected on

972-475: A freelance programmer. Softdisk , a computer company in Shreveport, Louisiana , hired Carmack to work on Softdisk G-S (an Apple II GS publication), introducing him to John Romero and other future key members of id Software such as Adrian Carmack (no relation). Later, Softdisk would place this team in charge of a new, but short-lived, bi-monthly game subscription product called Gamer's Edge for

1080-486: A game programmer for the Gamer's Edge video game subscription service and disk magazine at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana , developed a way to create graphics which could smoothly scroll in any direction in a computer game . At the time, IBM-compatible general-purpose computers were not able to replicate the common feat of video game consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System , which were capable of redrawing

1188-635: A million dollars a year." The company of hobbyists made steady progress toward their goals of suborbital space flight and eventual orbital vehicles. In October 2008, Armadillo Aerospace competed in a NASA contest known as the Lunar Lander Challenge , winning first place in the Level 1 competition along with $ 350,000 (~$ 486,412 in 2023). In September 2009, they completed Level 2 and were awarded $ 500,000 (~$ 690,323 in 2023). The company went into "hibernation mode" in 2013. According to Carmack,

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1296-440: A permanent pole. In 1878 Kenyon convinced his chief to make the necessary hole in the building and install the pole, after agreeing to pay for any necessary maintenance . The company crafted a pole out of a Georgia pine beam by shaving and sanding it into a 3-inch (7.6 cm) diameter pole which they gave several coats of varnish and a coat of paraffin . Despite being the butt of many jokes, others soon realized Company 21

1404-514: A regular customer that they continued to charge him 1995 prices. On occasion he has commended the efforts of similarly focused programmers – first Ken Silverman , who wrote the Build engine for 3D Realms , and later with Tim Sweeney of Epic Games , who wrote the Unreal Engine . Fireman%27s pole A fireman's pole (also called a firefighter's pole , sliding pole or

1512-597: A similar summary in CQ Amateur Radio described it as "Nintendo comes to the PC" and the "best action/adventure game" the reviewer had ever seen. After its release in December 1991, Goodbye, Galaxy met with sales "about a third" of the original trilogy. Scott Miller of Apogee blamed the falling sales on the lack of a third episode, which he felt undercut the shareware model of the game. Tom Hall has also claimed that

1620-416: A sixty-hour work week, working a 10-hour day, six days a week, throughout his career. He has spoken publicly about the importance of long hours of uninterrupted focus in his work. Not only does high intensity allow him to make progress more quickly, but long hours are also critical to maintaining a focused mindset over time. Despite working such a demanding schedule, he has never experienced burnout. Carmack

1728-500: A sticky substance of thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. However, an overweight accomplice struggled to get through the hole and instead opened the window, setting off a silent alarm and alerting police. Carmack was arrested and sent for psychiatric evaluation. He was sentenced to a year in a juvenile home. He attended the University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before withdrawing to work as

1836-488: A stun gun that permanently stuns enemies, and the 2001 Commander Keen has a stun gun that temporarily stuns enemies unless they are then killed with a pogo jump. The player can also find food items throughout the levels which grant points, with an extra life awarded with enough points. There are also colored keycards which grant access to locked parts of levels, collectable items that award an extra life beginning with episode four, and items that grant an instant extra life. In

1944-425: A tool for creating platform games, and the following month began a Kickstarter campaign for the tool and associated game, Secret Spaceship Club , which he described as a spiritual successor to Commander Keen . The project was unsuccessful in reaching its goal, though Hall said that he planned to continue working on it in his spare time. John Carmack John D. Carmack II (born August 21, 1970)

2052-623: Is Toast , was never developed, the Game Boy Color Commander Keen has a sub-space anomaly disrupting life on Earth as an effect of a plot by the Bloogs, Shikadi, and Droidicus, led by McMire, to destroy the universe. Keen fights his way through the three races' planets to find the plasma crystals powering the Omegamatic station, only for McMire to escape after taunting Keen a final time. In September 1990, John Carmack,

2160-399: Is also known for taking week-long programming retreats. These retreats involve a solitary, uninterrupted period away from his normal routine often sequestered in a random city and hotel. The goal of these retreats is to allow Carmack to operate at full cognitive capacity, tackling a specific, difficult problem or learning a new skill. The solitude and physical isolation of these retreats offer

2268-655: Is an American computer programmer and video game developer . He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen , Wolfenstein 3D , Doom , Quake , and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D computer graphics , such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes . In 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR as their CTO . In 2019, he reduced his role to Consulting CTO so he could allocate more time toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies. Carmack

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2376-507: Is now the slave of King Boobus Toober, and being asked by another child to save them, he journeys through the vegetable-themed land to defeat the King, waking up in his bed at home afterwards. The main series of games continues in "Secret of the Oracle", where Keen builds a faster-than-light radio and overhears plans by a race of aliens known as the Shikadi to destroy the galaxy. He flies off to

2484-448: Is set around the same time, though it is unclear whether it is actually after the events of Goodbye, Galaxy ; in it, the alien Bloogs of Fribbulus Xax kidnap Keen's babysitter and plan to eat her. Keen finds his way to her, and she reveals that she is McMire's sister, and that McMire was behind her kidnapping as a way to distract Keen while he plotted to destroy the universe. While the planned trilogy that would cover that plot, The Universe

2592-505: The 2012 presidential campaign of Libertarian Ron Paul , and is an atheist . During a conversation with Joe Rogan , Carmack revealed that he had trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Judo for several years as a hobby. During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years. Carmack had been such

2700-532: The BFG Edition in 2012). The source code for Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D (as well as Carmack's earlier Catacomb ) was released in June 2014 by Flat Rock Software with Carmack's blessing. He has since expressed regret on using the copyleft GPL over the more permissive BSD license . The release of id Tech 4 occurred despite patent concerns from Creative Labs over Carmack's reverse , while

2808-736: The Commander Keen series are side-scrolling platform video games: the majority of the game features the player-controlled Commander Keen viewed from the side while moving on a two-dimensional plane. The player can move left and right and can jump; in every episode besides Keen Dreams they can also use a pogo stick to bounce continuously and jump higher than they can normally with the correct timing. The levels are composed of platforms on which Keen can stand, and some platforms allow Keen to jump up through them from below. Beginning with episode two, "The Earth Explodes", there are also moving platforms as well as switches which extend bridges over gaps in

2916-454: The Mario series to remain exclusive to Nintendo consoles. Around the same time as the group was rejected by Nintendo, Romero was approached by Scott Miller of Apogee Software , who wanted him to publish more levels for his previous Pyramids of Egypt— an adventure game where the player navigates mazes while avoiding Egyptian-themed traps and monsters—through Apogee's shareware model. Miller

3024-624: The Under-ConScript Unicode Registry , using the codepoints U+EB40 [REDACTED] to U+EB5F [REDACTED] , and is included in the GNU Unifont CSUR extension. The Standard Galactic Alphabet also appears in the game Minecraft as the script and symbols used for its Enchanting Table. In January 2018, John Romero and Tom Hall stated on Twitter that Billy Blaze is the grandson of Wolfenstein protagonist William "B.J." Blazkowicz and

3132-725: The Utah GLX project. Carmack released the source code for Wolfenstein 3D in 1995 and the Doom source code in 1997, first under a custom license and then under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 1999. When the source code to Quake was leaked and circulated among the Quake community underground in 1997 after licensee Crack dot Com was hacked, a programmer unaffiliated with id Software named Greg Alexander used it to port Quake to Linux using SVGALib . As this

3240-485: The arcades during a summer vacation as a child. The 1980 maze chase arcade game Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He cited Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired. As reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom , when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school with other children to steal Apple II computers. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted

3348-422: The firefighting equipment , the floor above was for recreation and sleeping, and the top floor was the hayloft to store the winter supply of hay for the fire engines ' horses. During transport, the hay was secured to a wagon using a wooden binding pole, which was stored in the hayloft when not in use. Firefighter George Reid slid down the pole to respond to a call for help once, which inspired Kenyon to create

Commander Keen - Misplaced Pages Continue

3456-404: The video game industry 's biggest in-jokes , making cameo appearances in other games. The Dopefish, which Hall describes as "just a stupid green fish", is described in "Secret of the Oracle" as "the second-dumbest creature in the universe". It has appeared in dozens of other games since its initial appearance, as references, images, or the phrase "Dopefish Lives". The Standard Galactic Alphabet,

3564-486: The 1997 QuakeCon when she visited id's offices. As a bet, Kang challenged Carmack to sponsor the first all-female Quake tournament if she was able to produce a significant number of participants. Carmack predicted a maximum of 25 participants, but there were 1,500. Carmack and Kang married on January 1, 2000, and planned a ceremony in Hawaii. Steve Jobs requested that they would postpone the ceremony so Carmack could attend

3672-558: The 24½th Century and other Chuck Jones cartoons, and "The Available Data on the Worp Reaction", a short story about a child constructing a spaceship. Keen's "Bean-with-Bacon" spaceship was taken from a George Carlin skit about using bay leaves as deodorant so as to smell like soup. Keen was intended to be a reflection of Hall as he had wanted to be as a child. The team separated the game from its Super Mario Bros. roots by adding non-linear exploration and additional mechanics like

3780-534: The Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket, Keen dispenses galactic justice with an iron hand! The Ideas from the Deep team could not afford to leave their jobs to work on the game full-time, so they continued to work at Softdisk, spending their time on the Gamer's Edge games during the day and on Commander Keen at night and weekends using Softdisk computers. The group split into different roles: Hall became

3888-489: The Deep; a compilation release by Apogee in 1998 of the five episodes of Invasion of the Vorticons and Goodbye, Galaxy ; and the 3D Realms Anthology in 2014, which also includes Vorticons and Galaxy . The Apogee-published episodes have also been released for modern computers through a DOS emulator, and sold through Steam since 2007 as the Commander Keen Complete Pack . All of the games in

3996-699: The IBM PC (DOS) platform. In 1990, while still at Softdisk, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen games, a series that was published by Apogee Software , under the shareware distribution model, from 1991 onwards. Afterwards, Carmack left Softdisk to co-found id Software . Carmack has pioneered or popularized the use of many techniques in computer graphics, including " adaptive tile refresh " for Commander Keen , ray casting for Hovertank 3D , Catacomb 3-D , and Wolfenstein 3D , binary space partitioning which Doom became

4104-710: The MacWorld Expo on January 5, 2000. Carmack declined and suggested making a video instead. Carmack and Kang had a son Christopher Ryan in August 2004. Their second son was born in November 2009. Carmack is divorced as of 2022. On May 26, 2022, he announced his divorce and how he met his partner Trista through the VR Beat Saber games he would host via Twitter. As a game developer, Carmack differed from many of his contemporaries by avoiding commitment to

4212-609: The Oracle on the planet of Gnosticus IV, only to discover that the Gnosticenes that run the Oracle have been kidnapped by the Shikadi. Keen fights through the outposts and temples of the Shadowlands, rescuing the Gnosticenes, and the Oracle then tells Keen that the Shikadi are "shadow beings from the far side of the galaxy" who are building an Armageddon Machine at Korath III to blow up the galaxy and rebuild it as they wish afterwards. In "The Armageddon Machine", Keen infiltrates

4320-412: The Oracle", and Romero sent it off to a fan he had met from Canada, Mark Rein, who had offered to play-test the game. Romero was impressed with the list of bugs that Rein sent back, as well as with his business sense, and proposed bringing him in to the company as a probationary president for six months in order to help expand their business. Within a few weeks of being hired, Rein made a deal to get id into

4428-733: The United States, the National Fire Protection Association has called for the removal of all poles from US fire stations due to safety hazards. The fire service in New Zealand has already removed most of them. In the United Kingdom, more modern fire stations are built with one storey negating the need for a pole and they are sometimes removed from old stations that no longer require the upper floors for operational purposes. However, due to

Commander Keen - Misplaced Pages Continue

4536-418: The Vorticons was an immediate hit for Apogee: the company's previous sales levels had been around US$ 7,000 per month, but by Christmas Keen already had sales of almost US$ 30,000. Miller described the game as "a little atom bomb" to magazine editors and BBS controllers when asked about it, and recruited his mother and hired his first employee to handle sales and phone calls from interested players. By June 1991,

4644-416: The Vorticons . Billy Blaze, eight-year-old genius, working diligently in his backyard clubhouse has created an interstellar starship from old soup cans, rubber cement and plastic tubing. While his folks are out on the town and the babysitter has fallen asleep, Billy travels into his backyard workshop, dons his brother's football helmet, and transforms into... COMMANDER KEEN—defender of Earth! In his ship,

4752-401: The art style and the "bright and colorful" graphics, but disparaged the "busy" backgrounds and lackluster animations as making the game feel "choppy", and complained that the graphical updates did not reflect the ten years since the last releases. The gameplay similarly received mixed opinions; reviewers were split between praising the difficult, "old school" gameplay as a successful adaptation of

4860-530: The attack on Earth. In "Keen Must Die" he fights through the cities and outposts of the Vorticon home planet to reach the Grand Intellect, who is revealed to be his school rival Mortimer McMire, who he then defeats. In Keen Dreams , which is set outside of the main continuity, Keen falls asleep after dinner and wakes up in his pajamas in bed on top of a hill. After being told by potato soldiers that he

4968-421: The best Commander Keen episode and his favorite. Aliens Ate My Babysitter also did not sell as well as hoped for by id, which the team partially blamed on what they felt was terrible box art done by a company that had previously designed packaging for Lipton tea. Despite this, the sales were strong enough that id agreed to use FormGen as a retail publisher for at least two more games. PC Zone also stated that

5076-567: The best games of its type" and praised it for not being "mindlessly hard", instead requiring some thought to play through, and especially for the humor in the graphics and gameplay. According to Steam Spy , as of June 2016 there are approximately 200,000 owners of the 2007 Commander Keen Complete Pack on Steam, and approximately 80,000 owners of the Keen Dreams release. The 2001 Commander Keen received mixed reviews from critics. The graphics were both praised and criticized; reviewers praised

5184-432: The commercial market: to take the sixth episode and make it a stand-alone game, published as a retail title through FormGen instead of part of a shareware trilogy. Id signed the deal, but Scott Miller of Apogee was dismayed; he felt that not having a full trilogy for the shareware game would hurt sales. Also in August 1991, the team moved from Shreveport to Hall's hometown of Madison, Wisconsin , leaving behind Wilbur, who

5292-421: The completed first episode to BBSs, with the other two episodes listed as available for purchase as a mailed plastic bag with floppy disks for US$ 30 (~$ 70 in 2023). After the arrival of the first royalty check from Apogee, the team planned to quit Softdisk and start their own company. When their boss and owner of Softdisk Al Vekovius confronted them on their plans, as well as their use of company resources to develop

5400-408: The components, despite the efforts of Martians and robots; the final component is guarded by a Vorticon. Keen returns to Earth—discovering a Vorticon mothership in orbit—and beats his parents home. In "The Earth Explodes" he travels through the mothership and disables its weapons, at the end discovering that the Vorticons are being mind-controlled by the mysterious Grand Intellect, who is actually behind

5508-446: The demo to Nintendo itself, to position themselves as capable of building a PC version of Super Mario Bros. for the company. The group—composed of Carmack, Romero, Hall, and Wilbur, along with Lane Roathe, the editor for Gamer's Edge, decided to build a full demo game for their idea to send to Nintendo. As they lacked the computers to build the project at home, and could not work on it at Softdisk, they "borrowed" their work computers over

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5616-496: The design based on player feedback. The game's plot, as a result, was designed to be a standalone game outside of the continuity of the main series, and not a true sequel. Once the game engine and design changes were completed, Keen Dreams was completed in less than a month even as the team simultaneously worked on another game. Beginning development in the June 1991, the team again reprised their roles for Goodbye, Galaxy . Hall had received feedback from parents who did not like that

5724-419: The developer for the project as they had been attempting to get an agreement with id and Activision for several years for his studio to make a Game Boy Color version of several of their games. While Palmer was the developer for the game, id collaborated with the studio, with id having approval over game design elements and artist Adrian Carmack making some tile artwork for the game. Commander Keen in Invasion of

5832-581: The enemies in Vorticons left behind corpses instead of disappearing like in other games; he did not want the violence to have no effects, and so in Dreams had replaced the raygun with pellets that temporarily stunned enemies. He was not satisfied with this change, and while considering ways to remove Keen's parents during the introduction for Goodbye, Galaxy , came up with a stun gun which would leave behind permanently stunned enemies. Additionally, music, which

5940-420: The entire Keen series as well as several other games. As the game neared completion, Miller began to market the game to players. Strongly encouraged by the updates the team was sending him, he began heavily advertising the game in all of the bulletin board systems (BBS) and game magazines he had access to. The game was completed in early December 1990, and on the afternoon of December 14 Miller began uploading

6048-490: The entire screen fast enough for a side-scrolling video game due to their specialized hardware. Carmack created adaptive tile refresh : a way to slide the majority of the visible screen to the side both horizontally and vertically when the player moved as if it had not changed, and only redraw the newly-visible portions of the screen. Other games had previously redrawn the whole screen in chunks, or like Carmack's earlier games were limited to scrolling in one direction. He discussed

6156-522: The father of Doomguy from Doom . Commander Keen himself has appeared or has been referenced in many other video games over the years, including Doom II , Duke Nukem , Bio Menace and Doom (2016). A number of fan-made Commander Keen games have been created since the publication of the original titles, with a fan website, the Public Commander Keen Forum, devoted to their creation, announcement, and discussion. Since

6264-433: The firefighters descend to the ground floor, put on their firefighting gear, and board the fire engine as quickly as possible. The pole may run through a hole in the floor, or it may be accessed from a balcony. To use a pole, a firefighter grasps it with their hands, then clamps their legs around it, and then replaces their tight hand grip with a looser hand or arm grip to allow themselves to descend, using their legs to control

6372-502: The first episode, "Marooned on Mars", eight-year-old Billy Blaze, a child genius, builds a spaceship (the "Beans with Bacon Megarocket") and puts on his older brother's football helmet to become Commander Keen. One night while his parents are out of the house he flies to Mars to explore; while away from the ship the Vorticons steal four vital components and hide them in Martian cities. Keen journeys through Martian cities and outposts to find

6480-587: The first game to use, surface caching which he invented for Quake , Carmack's Reverse (formally known as z-fail stencil shadows) which he devised for Doom 3 , and MegaTexture technology, first used in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars . Quake 3 popularized the fast inverse square root algorithm. Carmack's engines have also been licensed for use in other influential first-person shooters such as Half-Life , Call of Duty and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault . In 2007, when Carmack

6588-407: The floor. Keen Dreams and later games add fireman's poles that Keen can climb up or down, and with the exception of the 2001 Commander Keen also show the platforms viewed from slightly above so as to give a pseudo-3D effect. Throughout the series, once entered, the only way to exit a level is to reach the end, though for Keen Dreams and episodes four through six the player can save and return to

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6696-425: The floor; and burns can occur due to friction if the skin rubs against the pole. If the pole runs through an unprotected hole in the floor, there is a risk of a person falling through it, as well as exhaust fumes rising into the living quarters. For these reasons, fire stations built since the 1970s are often built with the living quarters downstairs, and some older fire stations have had their poles removed. In

6804-514: The founding of id Software in February. In the summer of 1991, id hosted a seminar for game developers with the intention of licensing the Commander Keen engine ; they did so, forming the spiritual predecessor to both QuakeCon and id's standard of licensing their game engines. One of the enemies created for "Secret of the Oracle", the Dopefish, has since the game's release become one of

6912-466: The game designer and creative director, John Carmack and Romero were the programmers, and Wilbur the manager. They invited artist Adrian Carmack from Softdisk to join them late in development, while Roathe was soon removed from the group. Ideas from the Deep spent nearly every waking moment when they were not working at Softdisk from October through December 1990 working on Commander Keen , with Wilbur forcing them to eat and take breaks. The game's design

7020-473: The game was bringing in over US$ 60,000 per month. Chris Parker of PC Magazine later in 1991 referred to the game's release as a "tremendous success". In 2009, Miller estimated the game's lifetime sales as between 50,000 and 60,000 units. A contemporary review by Barry Simon of PC Magazine praised the game's graphical capabilities as having a "Nintendo feel", though he termed the graphics as "well drawn" but "not spectacular" in terms of resolution. He noted that

7128-410: The game was very much an arcade game that players would not purchase for "its scintillating plot or ground-breaking originality", but said that all three episodes were very fun to play and that the scrolling graphics set it apart from similar games. A short summary of the trilogy in 1992 by PC World termed it "one of the most spectacular games available" and praised the "superb" sound and graphics, and

7236-464: The game, led to the creation of Keen Dreams as a prototype for the second trilogy of episodes. The final episode was split off during development into a stand-alone retail title, and plans for a third trilogy were cancelled after the success of Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and development focus on 3D first-person shooters such as Doom (1993). The final Keen game ten years later had oversight but little development work from id. Critical reception and

7344-580: The game, the team made no secret of their intentions. Vekovius initially proposed a joint venture between the team and Softdisk, which fell apart when the other employees of the firm threatened to quit in response, and after a few weeks of negotiation the team agreed to produce a series of games for Gamer's Edge, one every two months. Ideas from the Deep, now founded as id Software, used some of these games to prototype ideas for their own games, including in late spring of 1991 Keen Dreams , which they used to develop new systems for their next set of major episodes of

7452-403: The game: Keen's red shoes and Green Bay Packers football helmet were items Hall wore as a child, dead enemies left behind corpses due to his belief that child players should be taught that death had permanent consequences, and enemies were based loosely on his reading of Sigmund Freud 's psychological theories, such as that of the id . Other influences on Hall for the game were Duck Dodgers in

7560-508: The ground floor, arriving well ahead of the rest of the company. Company Captain David Kenyon of Engine Company 21 then successfully petitioned the department be allowed to install a pole through the floor of the loft sleeping space to create what became the standard set-up. The firefighter's pole is found in multi-level fire stations, if the firefighters ' living quarters are located upstairs. When they are dispatched to an emergency,

7668-435: The idea with coworker Tom Hall, who encouraged him to demonstrate it by recreating the first level of the recent Super Mario Bros. 3 on a computer. The pair did so in a single overnight session, with Hall recreating the graphics of the game—replacing the player character of Mario with Dangerous Dave, a character from an eponymous previous Gamer's Edge game —while Carmack optimized the code. The next morning on September 20,

7776-421: The internal development of Quake in this regard and described it as "traumatic" and says id Software could have split the game into two parts and shipped it earlier. Carmack has a blog last updated in 2006 (previously a .plan , which could be accessed by making a finger request for johnc@idsoftware.com ), an active Twitter account, and also occasionally posts comments to Slashdot . Carmack supported

7884-433: The middle of a level, rather than only between levels like the other games. In between levels the player travels on a two-dimensional map, viewed from above; from the map the player can enter levels by approaching the entrance. Some levels are optional and can be bypassed, while others are secret and can only be reached by following specific procedures. The episodes all contain a different set of enemies in their levels, which

7992-572: The original Doom source release shipped without music due to complications with the Cygnus Studios developed DMX library (which lead to the Linux version being selected for release). Carmack has since advised developers to be careful when utilizing middleware, noting how it can limit the possibilities of later releasing source code. Tim Sweeney has implied this issue has hindered potential releases of older Unreal Engine source code. On

8100-490: The originals and dismissing the "aging" gameplay as sound but not comparing well to more recent games. Reviewers concluded that the game was an "acquired taste" best suited for fans of the original series or younger players. Ideas from the Deep's first royalty check from Apogee in January 1991 convinced them that they no longer needed their day jobs at Softdisk but could devote themselves full-time to their own ideas, leading to

8208-508: The other hand, despite his technical admiration for the system, Carmack has several times over the years voiced a sceptical opinion about Linux as a gaming platform . In 2013, he argued for emulation as the "proper technical direction for gaming on Linux", and in 2014 he voiced the opinion that Linux might be the biggest problem for the success of the Steam Machine . Carmack contributes to charities and gaming communities. Some of

8316-466: The perfect environment for deep focus and reflection, making them an essential part of Carmack's creative process. Carmack was vocal about his frustration with the bureaucratic inefficiencies he encountered during his time at Meta. In his departure memo, he stated, "We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort," he wrote. "I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set

8424-485: The player must kill, stun, or avoid. These enemies are typically aliens or robots. Levels can also include hazards, such as electricity or spikes; touching a hazard or most enemies causes Keen to lose a life , and the game is ended if all of Keen's lives are lost. Invasion of the Vorticons features a raygun that Keen can use ammo for to kill enemies; Keen Dreams exchanges this for flower power pellets that temporarily stun enemies when thrown, episodes four through six use

8532-409: The pogo stick. A suggestion from Miller that part of the popularity of Super Mario Bros was the presence of secrets and hidden areas in the game led Hall to add several secrets, such as an entire hidden level in the first episode, and the "Galactic Alphabet". The level maps were designed using a custom-made program called Tile Editor (TEd), which was first created for Dangerous Dave and was used for

8640-465: The potential of Carmack's idea should not be "wasted" on Softdisk; while the other members of the Gamer's Edge team more or less agreed, he especially felt that their talents in general were wasted on the company, which needed the money their games brought in but in his opinion neither understood nor appreciated video game design as distinct from general software programming. The manager of the team and fellow programmer, Jay Wilbur, recommended that they take

8748-403: The project after Wolfenstein was completed, but the team moved on to Doom (1993) instead. Id did not return to the series afterwards, instead continuing to focus on 3D first-person shooters. In October 1999 during an online question and answer session, John Carmack, while discussing that the original founders of id Software were unlikely to ever work together on a game again, mentioned that he

8856-588: The project that became the Game Boy Color game, that the original developers of Keen were unlikely to ever work together again on another game. In 2019, at Bethesda's E3 conference for iOS and Android devices held in June, a new game in the series was announced, again titled Commander Keen . Under development by ZeniMax Online Studios, the mobile game was said to include tactical strategy elements and have both single-player and multiplayer gameplay, and star Keen's twin son and daughter, Billy and Billie. It

8964-537: The recipients of Carmack's charitable contributions include his former high school, promoters of open-source software, opponents of software patents, and game enthusiasts. Carmack was so successful at id that by mid-1994 he had purchased two Ferraris : a Ferrari 328 and a Ferrari Testarossa . In 1997, he gave away the Ferrari 328 as a prize to Dennis Fong , the winner of the Quake tournament " Red Annihilation ". He met his now ex-wife Katherine Anna Kang , at

9072-582: The release of Goodbye, Galaxy and Aliens Ate My Babysitter in 1991, id Software planned to make a third set of episodes for the following December, titled Commander Keen in The Universe is Toast! . Beyond the proposed title and release date, shown in the epilogue of the two games, no design work was completed before the game was cancelled due to the success of id's Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and development focus on 3D first-person shooters such as Doom (1993). John Carmack noted in 1999, when referencing

9180-597: The release of utilities to modify the levels and graphics in the original Keen series in 2002, more than fifty mods have been made, most of which feature Commander Keen as the protagonist. These mods include "Commander Genius", an engine , released for multiple platforms, which interprets the episodes as a "retro-evolved" game, with re-polished graphics, a multiplayer compatibility, and a level editor , ports and remakes on different platforms, and The Universe Is Toast! mod, an unofficial sequel trilogy of games. In January 2013, Tom Hall began development of Worlds of Wander ,

9288-536: The resulting game, Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement , was shown to their other coworker John Romero. Romero recognized Carmack's idea as a major accomplishment: Nintendo was one of the most successful companies in Japan, largely due to the success of their Mario franchise , and the ability to replicate the gameplay of the series on a computer could have large implications. Romero felt that

9396-677: The sales of Aliens through shareware distributors was one of the highest in the shareware market in 1993. In October 1992, the Shareware Industry Awards gave the Commander Keen series the "Best Entertainment Software and Best Overall" award. A review of the entire Commander Keen series in 1993 by Sandy Petersen in the first "Eye of the Monitor" column for Dragon described the series as action games with "hilarious graphics". Acknowledging its debt to Super Mario Bros. , he called it, especially Goodbye, Galaxy , "one of

9504-431: The series' legacy has focused on the two main trilogies of episodes, with Vorticons having large success as a shareware game and impacting the success of Apogee (now 3D Realms) and its shareware model. The second trilogy sold fewer copies, which was blamed by id and Apogee on its split into two parts, and the 2001 game received mixed reviews. The MS-DOS games have been re-released in several compilation packages, and all but

9612-447: The series. They did not initially want to do a Keen game for Softdisk, but eventually decided that doing so would let them fulfill their obligations while also helping to improve the next full set of games for Apogee. The team reprised their roles from the first game, and prototyped an increase in graphical quality, a pseudo-3D view rather than a side-on view, ramps rather than solely flat surfaces, support for sound cards , and changes to

9720-414: The sixth episode are still sold through modern emulation releases on platforms such as Steam . References to the series have been made by dozens of other games, especially to the Dopefish, an enemy in the fourth episode, which has been termed one of the video game industry 's biggest in-jokes . An active modding community has grown around the series, producing editing tools and unofficial sequels. After

9828-448: The smartest people in the world. He states, "Little tiny steps using local information winds up leading to all the best answers." Around 2000, Carmack became interested in rocketry, a hobby of his youth. Reviewing how much money he was spending on customizing Ferraris, he began by giving financial support to a few local amateur engineers. Carmack funded the company, called Armadillo Aerospace, out of his own pocket, for "something north of

9936-479: The speed. This is somewhat similar to the technique used for fast-roping . Spiral staircases or sliding chutes were once common, but not particularly fast. Fire houses were also equipped with spiral staircases so horses would not try to climb the stairs into the living quarters. Captain David B. Kenyon of Chicago's all-black Engine Company No. 21 worked in a three-story fire station. The ground floor contained

10044-404: The split hurt the sales of the shareware episodes, though he has said that "they still did decently, though". PC Zone , in its first issue in 1993, quoted shareware distributors as saying Goodbye, Galaxy was one of the top shareware sellers of 1992, behind Wolfenstein 3D . IGN has also referred to the pair of episodes as "Apogee's hottest sellers". Hall has claimed "The Armageddon Machine" as

10152-424: The strong tradition, time advantages and new safety features, poles are common worldwide even in newly built stations. Slide poles can be made safer. Cushions can be placed around the base of the pole to soften landings. Exhaust control systems can stop fumes from rising upstairs. To prevent accidental falls, the pole can be guarded by railings, baskets, a door or a weight-activated trapdoor that opens only when weight

10260-504: The suit. On November 13, 2019, Carmack stepped down from the Oculus CTO role to become a "Consulting CTO" in order to allocate more time to his work on artificial general intelligence (AGI). On August 19, 2022, Carmack announced that he has raised $ 20M for Keen Technologies, his new AGI company. On December 16, 2022, Carmack left Oculus to focus on Keen. "Working more gets more done." — John Carmack Carmack has maintained

10368-538: The titular space station to disable it, destroying the subsystems of the machine located in each level. When he finishes, he finds that the "Gannalech" that was leading the Shikadi was the Grand Intellect McMire, who had escaped Keen in Vorticons by leaving behind an android in his place. A note left behind for Keen tells him that McMire plans to instead destroy the Universe. Aliens Ate My Babysitter

10476-405: The weekend, taking them in their cars to a house shared by Carmack, Wilbur, and Roathe, and made a copy of the first level of the game over the next 72 hours. They credited the game to Ideas from the Deep, a name Romero had previously used for some Softdisk projects. The response from Nintendo a few weeks later was not as hoped for, however; while Nintendo was impressed with their efforts, they wanted

10584-477: The work in the aerospace industry is "simple" compared to the work he does in video games. Carmack is an advocate of open-source software , and has repeatedly voiced his opposition to software patents , equating them to robbery. He has also contributed to open-source projects, such as starting the initial port of the X Window System to Mac OS X Server and working to improve the OpenGL drivers for Linux through

10692-628: Was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas , the son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack. He grew up in the Kansas City metropolitan area , where he became interested in computers at an early age. He attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri . Carmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot 'em up game Space Invaders in

10800-562: Was considering the idea of making a Commander Keen game for the Game Boy Color handheld game console . Activision formally announced at the start of May 2001 that a new Commander Keen game had been developed by David A. Palmer Productions, and would be released at the end of the month. An interview the following week with founder David A. Palmer explained that the original idea for the game came from id, who approached Activision to produce it; Activision in turn recommended Palmer as

10908-408: Was largely driven by Tom Hall: Romero and especially John Carmack were focused almost exclusively on the programming; Wilbur was not involved in the game's design; and Adrian Carmack joined late in development and found the project's "cute" art style, till then mostly created by Hall, far-removed from his preferred, darker, style. Hall's personal experiences and philosophies, therefore, strongly impacted

11016-426: Was missing in prior Keen games, was added to Goodbye, Galaxy , composed by Bobby Prince . The game, episodes four though six, was intended to be published as a set named Goodbye, Galaxy in the same manner as the first one: released through Apogee, with episode four released for free in order to spur interest in purchasing the other two episodes. By August they had completed a beta version of episode four, "Secret of

11124-468: Was more feature rich than Dave Taylor 's earlier X11 port, he sent the patches to Carmack. Instead of pursuing legal action, id Software used the patches as the foundation for a company-sanctioned Linux port maintained by new hire Zoid Kirsch, who later ported Quakeworld and Quake II to Linux as well. id Software has since publicly released the source code to Quake in 1999, Quake 2 in 2001, Quake 3 in 2005 and lastly Doom 3 in 2011 (and later

11232-457: Was on vacation with his wife, he ended up playing some games on his cellphone, and decided he was going to make a "good" mobile game. On August 7, 2013, Carmack joined Oculus VR as their CTO . On November 22, 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR. Carmack's reason for leaving was that id's parent company ZeniMax Media did not want to support Oculus Rift. Carmack's role at both companies later became central to

11340-445: Was pioneering a model of game publishing where part of a game would be released for free, with the remainder of the game available for purchase from Apogee. Romero said he could not, as Pyramids of Egypt was owned by Softdisk, but that it did not matter as the game he was now working on was much better, and sent Miller the Mario demo. Miller was impressed, and the team agreed to create a new game for Apogee before Christmas of 1990—only

11448-405: Was planned for release in the summer of the same year, but no release or further announcements were made, and all references to the game were removed from Bethesda and ZeniMax websites by June 2020. In addition to the initial releases of the games, several compilation releases have been published: the id Anthology compilation in 1996, which includes all seven episodes developed by id or Ideas from

11556-488: Was unwilling to leave a stable job at Softdisk to fully join in with the startup, but picking up programmer Jason Blochowiak, who was working at the time at Softdisk. There, they worked on Goodbye, Galaxy , their remaining Softdisk games, and the now standalone Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter between August and December. Despite being listed numerically as the sixth episode, due to it having

11664-556: Was usually the first company to arrive when called, especially at night, and the chief of the department ordered the poles to be installed in all Chicago fire stations. In 1880 the first brass pole was installed in the Worcester Fire Department . Losing one's grip on the pole can result in falling from a great height; the firefighter may hit an object such as a door extending from a truck; poor speed control can result in injured or even broken legs upon impact with

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