Misplaced Pages

#174825

90-654: Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons is a three-part episodic side-scrolling platform video game developed by Ideas from the Deep (a precursor to id Software ) and published by Apogee Software in 1990 for MS-DOS . It is the first set of episodes of the Commander Keen series. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, as he retrieves the stolen parts of his spaceship from

180-502: A "Nintendo feel", though he termed the graphics as "well drawn" but "not spectacular" in terms of resolution. He noted that 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 in PC World termed it "one of

270-408: A 1-Up could be obtained in several ways, including grabbing a green "1-Up Mushroom", collecting 100 coins, using a Koopa shell to kill 8 or more consecutive enemies, and jumping on 8 or more consecutive enemies without touching the ground. The term quickly caught on, seeing use in both home and arcade video games. A number of games included an exploitable design flaw called a "1-up loop", in which it

360-547: A Vorticon at each cannon's control. At the end of the episode, he discovers that the Vorticons are being mind-controlled by the mysterious Grand Intellect, who is actually behind the attack on Earth. In the third episode, Keen journeys to the Vorticon homeworld of Vorticon VI to find the Grand Intellect. He travels through Vorticon cities and outposts to gain access to the Grand Intellect's lair, fighting mostly against

450-520: A chance to learn a game's mechanics before the game is over. Another reason to implement lives is that the ability to earn extra lives provide an additional reward incentive for the player. Many older video games feature cheat codes that allow you to gain extra lives without earning them throughout gameplay. One example is Contra , which added the option to input the Konami code to get 30 extra lives. In modern times, some free-to-play games, such as

540-543: A few weeks later was not as hoped for: while Nintendo was impressed with their efforts, they wanted the Mario series to remain exclusive to Nintendo consoles. Around the same time the group was rejected by Nintendo, Romero was receiving fan mail about some of the games he had developed for Gamer's Edge . Upon realizing that all the letters came from different people but shared the same address—that of Scott Miller of Apogee Software —he wrote back an angry reply, only to receive

630-473: A flooding river to make it to the house anyway. As the principal designer, Hall's personal experiences and philosophies strongly impacted 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

720-516: A game programmer for the Gamer's Edge video game subscription service and disk magazine at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana , with the aid of a copy of Michael Abrash 's Power Graphics Programming , developed from scratch 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

810-466: A genre that lasted nearly 5 years. The game was designed as Technos Japan 's spiritual successor to Renegade , but it took the genre to new heights with its detailed set of martial arts attacks and its outstanding two-player cooperative gameplay. Double Dragon ' s success largely resulted in a flood of beat 'em ups that came in the late 1980s, where acclaimed titles such as Golden Axe and Final Fight (both 1989) distinguished themselves from

900-465: A level is successfully completed, unlike energy. An extra life or a 1-up is a video game item that increments the player character's number of lives. Because there are no universal game rules, the form 1-ups take varies from game to game, but are often rare and difficult items to acquire. The use of the term "1-up" to designate an extra life first appeared in Super Mario Bros. , where

990-532: 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. The scrolling technique did not meet Softdisk's coding guidelines as it needed at least a 16-color EGA graphics processor, and the programmers in the office who did not work on games were not as impressed as Romero. Romero felt that

SECTION 10

#1732790730175

1080-486: A new game for Apogee. The group negotiated that Miller would front them money for the development costs, which Miller later claimed was all the money Apogee had. Miller sent the group a US$ 2,000 (~$ 4,664 in 2023) advance in return for an agreement that they would create a game before Christmas of 1990, only a few months away. This advance was the team's entire budget for development. The game was planned to be split into three parts to match Apogee's shareware model of giving away

1170-401: A number of minutes or hours. Players can either wait for lives, attempt alternate activities to recover lives (such as asking for friends online to donate lives), or purchase items that can fully replenish lives or grant unlimited lives for a limited time to continue playing immediately. This system works like an "energy" meter for other free-to-play games, however, lives do not deplete when

1260-426: A phone call from Miller soon after. Miller explained that he was trying to get in contact with Romero unofficially, as he expected that Softdisk would screen his mail to him at the company. He wanted to convince Romero to publish more levels for his previous Pyramids of Egypt —an adventure game in which the player navigates mazes while avoiding Egyptian-themed traps and monsters—through Apogee's shareware model. Miller

1350-430: A player can recover from making a disastrous mistake. Role-playing games and adventure games usually grant only one, but allow player-characters to reload a saved game . Lives set up the situation where dying is not necessarily the end of the game, allowing the player to take risks they might not take otherwise, or experiment with different strategies to find one that works . Multiple lives also allow novice players

1440-399: 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 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

1530-631: 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. Id Software also produced several more games in the Commander Keen series; the first of these, Commander Keen in Keen Dreams , was published in 1991 through their agreement with Softdisk. Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy , composed of

1620-573: A short summary for the game: a dramatic introduction about eight-year-old genius Billy Blaze, defending the Earth with his spaceship. When he read out the summary in an over-dramatic voice to the group, they laughed and applauded, and the group agreed to begin work on Commander Keen in the Invasion of 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

1710-482: A side-view format. On home computers , such as the martial arts game Karateka (1984) successfully experimented with adding plot to its fighting game action, and was also the first side-scroller to include cutscenes . Character action games also include scrolling platform games like Super Mario Bros. (1985), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and Bubsy (1993). Super Mario Bros. in particular, released for

1800-488: A simple platformer with horizontally scrolling levels and first mascot character. Namco followed up Pac-Land with the fantasy-themed Dragon Buster the following year. Nintendo's platform game Super Mario Bros. , designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, became the archetype for many scrolling platformers to follow. It established many of

1890-468: A spaceship 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, but 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 the components, despite the efforts of Martians and robots to stop him. After securing

SECTION 20

#1732790730175

1980-529: A way to implement smooth side-scrolling in video games on personal computers (PCs), which at the time was the province of dedicated home video game consoles . Carmack and his coworkers John Romero and Tom Hall , along with Jay Wilbur and Lane Roathe, developed a demo of a PC version of Super Mario Bros. 3 , but failed to convince Nintendo to invest in a PC port of their game. Soon afterwards, however, they were approached by Scott Miller of Apogee Software to develop an original game to be published through

2070-456: Is considered one of the strongest beat 'em up titles for its fantasy elements, distinguishing it from the urban settings seen in other beat 'em ups. In 1984, Pac-Land took the scrolling platform game a step further. It was not only a successful title, but it more closely resembled later scrolling platformers like Wonder Boy and Super Mario Bros. It also has multi-layered parallax scrolling . The same year, Sega released Flicky ,

2160-507: The Candy Crush Saga trilogy, capitalize on the multiple life system to create an opportunity to earn more microtransactions . In such games, a life is lost when the player fails a level, but once all lives are lost, the player is prevented from continuing the game for a temporary amount of time, instead of receiving a game over that would entail total failure or require a new beginning, as lives will re-generate automatically after

2250-570: The 3D Realms Anthology in 2014. They have also been released for modern computers through a DOS emulator, and sold through Steam since 2007 as a part of the Commander Keen Complete Pack . According to Steam Spy , as of 2017 over 200,000 copies are registered through Steam. Side-scrolling video game Hardware support of smooth scrolling backgrounds is built into many arcade video games , some game consoles, and home computers. Examples include 8-bit systems like

2340-641: The Atari 8-bit computers and Nintendo Entertainment System , and 16-bit consoles, such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis . These 16-bit consoles added multiple layers, which can be scrolled independently for a parallax scrolling effect. Sega 's Bomber was a side-scrolling shooter video game released for arcades in April 1977. Side-scrolling was later popularized by side-scrolling shoot 'em ups in

2430-476: The Atari VCS in 1982: the biplane-based Barnstorming and the top-view Grand Prix . By 1984, there were other racing games played from a side-scrolling view, including Nintendo 's Excitebike SNK 's Jumping Cross . and Mystic Marathon from Williams Electronics , a footrace between fantasy creatures. In 1985, Konami's side-scrolling shooter: Gradius gave the player greater control over

2520-489: The Commander Keen series over the next year. The trilogy was lauded by reviewers due to the graphical achievement and humorous style, and id Software went on to develop other successful games, including Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993). The Vorticons trilogy has been released as part of several collections by id and Apogee since its first release, and has been sold for modern computers through Steam since 2007. The three episodes of Commander Keen in Invasion of

2610-474: The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console, had a significant impact on the game industry, establishing the conventions of the scrolling platform genre and helping to reinvigorate the North American home video game market (which had crashed in 1983 ). It combined the platform gameplay of Donkey Kong (1981) and Mario Bros. (1983) with side-scrolling elements from the racer Excitebike and

2700-474: The id . Other influences on Hall for the game were Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953) and other Chuck Jones cartoons, and "The Available Data on the Worp Reaction", a 1953 short story by Lion Miller 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

2790-559: The player character and bosses. The side-scrolling character action game format was popular from the mid-1980s to the 1990s. Popular examples included ninja action games such as Taito 's The Legend of Kage (1985) and Sega's Shinobi (1987), beat 'em up games such as Technōs Japan 's Renegade (1986) and Double Dragon (1987), and run and gun video games such as Namco 's Rolling Thunder (1986) and Treasure 's Gunstar Heroes (1993). Legend of Kage notably had levels that extend in all directions, while maintained

Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons - Misplaced Pages Continue

2880-490: The proof-of-concept game Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement , which was a clone of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 , but with Mario replaced by the character Dangerous Dave of earlier Softdisk games. The success of the demonstration led Carmack and others at Softdisk to resign and form their own company, id Software . Id Software went on to develop Commander Keen that same year, which

2970-408: The 2017 History of Digital Games , author Andrew Williams claims that Vorticons "signaled a new direction for computer games in general", as well as setting a tone of gameplay mechanics for future id games, by introducing a sense of "effortless movement" as players explored through large open spaces instead of disconnected screens like prior platforming computer games. In the summer of 1991, id hosted

3060-535: The Apogee shareware model. Hall designed the three-part game, John Carmack and Romero programmed it, Wilbur managed the team, and artist Adrian Carmack helped later in development. The team worked continuously for almost three months on the game, working late into the night at the office at Softdisk and taking their work computers to John Carmack's home to continue developing it. Released by Apogee in December 1990,

3150-433: 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. Several members of the team have mentioned in interviews as an example of the team's commitment a night during development when a heavy storm flooded the path to get to the house, preventing them from working, and John Romero waded through

3240-535: The Deep's first royalty check from Apogee in January 1991 for US$ 10,500 convinced them that they no longer needed their day jobs at Softdisk but could devote themselves full-time to their own ideas. Hall and Wilbur were concerned about the risk of being sued if they did not break the news gently to Softdisk, but Romero and John Carmack were dismissive of the possibility, especially as they felt they had no assets for which they could be sued. Shortly thereafter, John Carmack

3330-607: The Vorticons make up one side-scrolling platform video game : most of the game features the player-controlled Commander Keen viewed from the side while moving on a two-dimensional plane. Keen can move left and right and can jump; after finding a pogo stick in the first episode, he can also bounce continuously and jump higher than he 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. The second episode introduces moving platforms as well as switches that extend bridges over gaps in

3420-421: The Vorticons themselves. Upon reaching the lair, he discovers that the Grand Intellect is actually his school rival Mortimer McMire, whose IQ is "a single point higher" than Keen's. Keen defeats Mortimer and his "Mangling Machine" and frees the Vorticons from mind-control; the Vorticon king and "the other Vorticons you haven't slaughtered" then award him a medal for saving them. In September 1990, John Carmack ,

3510-499: The beat 'em up Kung-Fu Master , and was more expansive than earlier side-scrollers, striking a balance between arcade-like action and longer play sessions suited for home systems. In 1984, Hong Kong cinema -inspired Kung-Fu Master laid the foundations for side-scrolling beat 'em ups , by simplifying the combat of Karate Champ and introducing numerous enemies along a side-scrolling playfield. In 1986, Technōs Japan 's Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun introduced street brawling to

3600-595: The choice of weaponry, thus introducing another element of strategy. The game also introduced the need for the player to memorize levels in order to achieve any measure of success. Gradius , with its iconic protagonist, defined the side-scrolling shoot 'em up and spawned a series spanning several sequels. In the mid-1980s, side-scrolling character action games (also called "side-scrolling action games" or side-scrolling "character-driven" games) emerged, combining elements from earlier side-view, single-screen character action games, such as single-screen platform games , with

3690-421: The cities of Mars, prevents a recently arrived alien mothership from destroying landmarks on Earth, and hunts down the leader of the aliens, the Grand Intellect, on the alien home planet. The three episodes feature Keen running, jumping, and shooting through various levels while opposed by aliens, robots, and other hazards. In September 1990, John Carmack , while working at programming studio Softdisk , developed

Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons - Misplaced Pages Continue

3780-461: The common feat of home computers like the Commodore 64 or video game consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System , that of redrawing the entire screen fast enough for a smooth side-scrolling video game due to their specialized hardware. Carmack, rejecting the "clever little shortcuts" that other programmers had attempted to solve the problem, created adaptive tile refresh : a way to slide

3870-542: The company was reliant on the Gamer's Edge subscriptions and tried to convince the group to instead form a new company in partnership with Softdisk; when Ideas from the Deep made no secret of the offer in the office, the other employees threatened to all quit if the team was "rewarded" for stealing from the company. After several weeks of negotiation, the Ideas team agreed to produce a series of games for Softdisk, one every two months, and on February 1, founded id Software . In

3960-592: The concept of player lives, instead simply restarting the player from the nearest checkpoint when they die, allowing them to undo or rewind their progress until such time as they are safe, as in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time , or making saving the player from death contingent on successfully executing a QTE , as in Batman: Arkham Asylum . It is common in action games for the player to have multiple lives and chances to earn more in-game. This way,

4050-542: The conventions of the side-scrolling platform genre and struck a balance between arcade-like action and longer play sessions suited for home systems, helping to reinvigorate the North American home video game market. Compared to earlier platformers, Super Mario Bros. was more expansive, with the player having to "strategize while scrolling sideways" over long distances across colorful levels aboveground as well as underground. Its side-scrolling elements were influenced by two earlier side-scrollers that Miyamoto's team worked on,

4140-410: 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, Wilbur, and Gamer's Edge editor Lane Roathe—decided to build a full demo game 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

4230-531: The desire to avoid the finality of the player character's death compelled players to insert more quarters, making the maximum amount of profit. Later, refinements of health, defense and other attributes , as well as power-ups , made managing the player character's life a more strategic experience and made lost health less of the handicap it was in early arcade games. Lives and game over screens became thought of as outmoded concepts and holdovers from arcade games that were unnecessary when players had already paid for

4320-477: The early 1980s. Defender , demonstrated by Williams Electronics in late 1980 and entering production in early 1981, allowed side-scrolling in both directions in a wrap-around game world, extending the boundaries of the game world, while also including a mini-map radar. Scramble , released by Konami in early 1981, had continuous scrolling in a single direction and was the first side-scroller with multiple distinct levels . The first scrolling platform game

4410-464: The early 1990s and with the popularity of 16-bit consoles , the scrolling shooter genre was overcrowded, with developers struggling to make their games stand out. Side-scrolling was a well-known phenomenon in arcades, and various home computer and console games of the 1980s, as they often possessed hardware optimized for the task like the Atari 8-bit computers and Commodore 64 , but IBM compatibles did not. Smooth scrolling on IBM PCs in software

4500-616: The episodes "Secret of the Oracle" and "The Armageddon Machine", was published through Apogee in December 1991, and the final id-developed Keen game, Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter , was published through FormGen around the same time. Another trilogy of episodes, titled The Universe Is Toast! , was planned for December 1992, but was cancelled after the success of id's Wolfenstein 3D and development focus on Doom . A final Keen game, Commander Keen ,

4590-442: The final component, which is guarded by a Vorticon, Keen returns to Earth—discovering a Vorticon mothership in orbit—and beats his parents home, who discover that he now has a pet Yorp. In the second episode, the Vorticon mothership has locked its X-14 Tantalus Ray cannons on eight of Earth's landmarks, and Keen journeys to the ship to find and deactivate each of the cannons. Keen does so by fighting more varied enemies and hazards and

SECTION 50

#1732790730175

4680-473: 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, including the Vorticon trilogy, "one of the best games of its type" and praised it for not being "mindlessly hard", though still requiring some thought to play through, and especially for the humor in the graphics and gameplay. Ideas from

4770-445: The first episode, and a "Galactic Alphabet" in which signs in the game were written, which if deciphered by the players revealed hidden messages, jokes, and instructions. 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 the entire Keen series as well as several other games. To maintain the mood of the game's storyline and entice players to play

4860-534: The first level of the recently released 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, September 20, Carmack and Hall showed the resulting game, Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement , to another coworker, John Romero . Romero recognized Carmack's programming feat as

4950-402: The first part for free to attract interest in the whole. Ideas from the Deep convened to come up with the design for the game, and 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. John Carmack added the idea of a genius child protagonist saving the world, and Hall quickly created

5040-463: The floor. Once entered, the only way to exit a level is to reach the end, and the player cannot save and return to the middle of a level. In between levels, Keen travels on a two-dimensional map, viewed from above; from the map the player can enter levels by moving Keen to the entrance or save their progress in the game. Some levels are optional and can be bypassed, while others are secret and can only be reached by following specific procedures. Each of

5130-490: The game as "a little atom bomb" to magazine editors and BBS controllers when asked about it; its success led him to recruit his mother and hire his first employee to handle sales and phone calls from interested players, and to quit his other job and move Apogee from his house into an office. By June 1991, the game was bringing in over US$ 60,000 per month; in 1995 the team estimated that the game had made US$ 300,000 to $ 400,000. Chris Parker of PC Magazine later in 1991 referred to

5220-412: 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 kicked out of the group; Romero, the self-appointed leader of the team, liked him but felt that his work ethic did not match well with the rest of the team and pushed for his removal. Ideas from

5310-480: The game full-time, so they continued to work at Softdisk making Gamer's Edge games during the day while working on Commander Keen at night. They also continued to take home their work computers to Carmack's house on the weekends, putting them in their cars at night and bringing them back in the morning before anyone else arrived; they even began to request upgrades to the computers from Softdisk, nominally for their work. The group split into different roles: Hall became

5400-422: The game is ended if all of Keen's lives are lost. After finding a raygun in the first episode, Keen can shoot at enemies using ammunition found throughout the game; different enemies take differing numbers of shots to kill, or in some cases are immune. Some enemies can also be stunned if they are jumped on, such as the one-eyed Yorps, which block Keen's path but do not harm him. Keen can find food items throughout

5490-526: The game's food items to keep them motivated. The game was completed in early December 1990, and on the afternoon of December 14, Miller began uploading 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. Commander Keen 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 (~$ 59,838 in 2023). Miller described

SECTION 60

#1732790730175

5580-431: The game's release as a "tremendous success". Apogee announced plans to license the game to another publisher for a Nintendo Entertainment System port in an advertising flyer that year, but no such version was ever created. Scott Miller estimated in 2009 that the trilogy eventually sold between 50,000 and 60,000 copies. A contemporary review by Barry Simon of PC Magazine praised the game's graphical capabilities as having

5670-428: The game. They also discouraged the player from playing the game fairly, with players in games such as Doom resorting to save scumming in order to preserve their lives rather than start from an in-game checkpoint with their lives depleted, and getting a game over can often cause players to permanently abandon a game instead of making another attempt at the level. Therefore, most modern games have completely abandoned

5760-542: The genre during the 8-bit console generation. Sega attempted to emulate this success with their Alex Kidd series, as well as with the Wonder Boy series. The later Wonder Boy games were also notable for combining adventure and role-playing elements with traditional platforming. In 1984, Hover Attack for the Sharp X1 was an early run & gun shooter that freely scrolled in all directions and allowed

5850-410: The genre. The Western adaptation Renegade (released the same year) added an underworld revenge plot that proved more popular with gamers than the principled combat sport of other games. Renegade set the standard for future beat 'em up games as it introduced the ability to move both horizontally and vertically . In 1987, the release of Double Dragon ushered in a "Golden Age" for the beat 'em up

5940-424: The levels which grant points, with an extra life awarded every 20,000 points. There are also colored keycards that grant access to locked parts of levels, and in the third episode on rare occasions an ankh , which gives Keen temporary invulnerability. The game is broken up into three episodes: "Marooned on Mars", "The Earth Explodes", and "Keen Must Die!". In the first episode, eight-year-old child Billy Blaze builds

6030-454: The majority of the visible screen to the side both horizontally and vertically when the player character moved as if it had not changed, and only redraw the newly-visible portions of the screen. Other scrolling computer games had previously redrawn the whole screen in chunks, or like Carmack's earlier games were limited to scrolling in one direction. He discussed the idea with coworker Tom Hall , who encouraged him to demonstrate it by recreating

6120-424: The managing of lives a more strategic experience for players over time. Lives give novice players more chances to learn the mechanics of a video game, while allowing more advanced players to take more risks. Lives may have originated from the pinball mechanic of having a limited number of balls. A finite number of lives (usually three) became a common feature in arcade games. The number of lives usually displayed on

6210-455: The morbid insinuation of losing one's "life". Generally, if the player loses all their health , they lose a life. Losing all lives usually grants the player character "game over", forcing them to either restart or stop playing. The number of lives a player is granted varies per game type. A finite number of lives became a common feature in arcade games and action games during the 1980s, and mechanics such as checkpoints and power-ups made

6300-649: The most spectacular games available" and praised the "superb" sound and graphics, while 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. 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

6390-430: The next episode, the team incorporated cliffhangers between each part of the trilogy. 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 the bulletin board systems (BBS) and game magazines he had access to, as well as sending the team US$ 100 checks every week labelled "pizza bonus" after one of

6480-482: The others. Final Fight was Capcom's intended sequel to Street Fighter (provisionally titled Street Fighter '89 ), but the company ultimately gave it a new title. Acclaimed as the best game in the genre, Final Fight spawned two sequels and was later ported to other systems. Golden Axe was acclaimed for its visceral hack and slash action and cooperative mode and was influential through its selection of multiple protagonists with distinct fighting styles. It

6570-423: The player to shoot diagonally as well as straight ahead. 1985 saw the release of Thexder , a breakthrough title for platform shooters. Run and gun video games became popular during the mid-to-late 1980s, with titles such as Konami 's Green Beret (1985) and Namco 's Rolling Thunder (1986). 1987's Contra was acclaimed for its multi-directional aiming and two-player cooperative gameplay. However, by

6660-463: 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, fellow programmer Jay Wilbur, recommended that they take

6750-456: The racer Excitebike and the NES port of beat 'em up Kung-Fu Master . It used the same game engine as Excitebike , which allowed Mario to accelerate from a walk to a run, rather than move at a constant speed like earlier platformers. Super Mario Bros. went on to sell over 40 million copies according to the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records . Its success contributed greatly to popularizing

6840-511: The scenery. The following year, Irem 's Moon Patrol (1982) implemented a full form of parallax scrolling, with three separate background layers scrolling at different speeds, simulating the distance between them. Moon Patrol is often credited with popularizing parallax scrolling. Jungle Hunt also had parallax scrolling and was released the same month as Moon Patrol in June 1982. Activision published two side-scrolling racing games for

6930-406: The screen (in arcade games, the character that is being played, is also counted as a "life"). Much like in pinball games, the player's goal was usually to score as many points as possible with their limited number of lives. Taito 's classic arcade video game Space Invaders (1978) is usually credited with introducing multiple lives to video games. Lives were important in these games because

7020-409: The side-scrolling of space/vehicle games, such as scrolling space shoot 'em ups . These new side-scrolling character-driven action games featured large characters sprites in colorful, side-scrolling environments, with the core gameplay consisting of fighting large groups of weaker enemies, using attacks/weapons such as punches, kicks, guns, swords, ninjutsu or magic. The most notable early example

7110-410: The three episodes contain a different set of enemies in their levels, which Keen must kill or avoid. The first episode includes Martians, the second largely uses robots, and the third more species of aliens. All three episodes also include Vorticons, large blue canine-like aliens. Levels can also include hazards like electricity or spikes. Touching a hazard or most enemies causes Keen to lose a life , and

7200-495: 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, the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket, Keen dispenses galactic justice with an iron hand! The Ideas from the Deep team, who referred to themselves as the "IFD guys", could not afford to leave their jobs to work on

7290-419: The trilogy of episodes was an immediate success. Apogee, whose monthly sales had been around US$ 7,000, made US$ 30,000 on Commander Keen alone in the first two weeks and US$ 60,000 per month by June. The first royalty check convinced the development team, then known as Ideas from the Deep, to quit their jobs at Softdisk. The team founded id Software shortly thereafter and went on to produce another four episodes of

7380-440: The weekend, taking them in their cars to a house shared by Carmack, Wilbur, and Roathe. The group then spent the next 72 hours working non-stop on the demo, which copied Super Mario Bros. 3 with some shortcuts taken in the artwork, sound, and level design, and a title screen that credited the game to the programmers under the name Ideas from the Deep, a name Romero had used for some prior Softdisk projects. The response from Nintendo

7470-488: Was Jump Bug , a platform-shooter released in 1981. Players controlled a bouncing car and navigated it to jump on various platforms like buildings, clouds, and hills. While it primarily scrolls horizontally, one section includes coarse vertical scrolling. Taito 's first attempt at a side-scrolling platformer was the arcade game Jungle King (1982), later altered and renamed to Jungle Hunt due to legal controversy over similarities to Tarzan . The side-scrolling format

7560-482: Was Irem 's Kung-Fu Master (1984), the first and most influential side-scrolling martial arts action game. It adapted combat mechanics similar to single-screen fighting game Karate Champ (1984) for a side-scrolling format, along with adapting elements from two Hong Kong martial arts films, Bruce Lee 's Game of Death (1973) and Jackie Chan 's Wheels on Meals (1984), and had elements such as end-of-level boss battles as well as health meters for

7650-417: Was a challenge for developers. There were a small number of PC ports of smooth scrolling arcade games in the early 1980s, including Moon Patrol and Defender . The second version of Sopwith , released in 1986, also featured smooth scrolling. In 1990 John Carmack , then working for Softdisk , developed a smooth scrolling technique known as adaptive tile refresh . The technique was demonstrated in

7740-559: Was confronted by their boss, Softdisk owner Al Vekovius, who had become suspicious of the group's increasingly erratic, disinterested, and surly behavior at work, as well as their multiple requests for computer upgrades. Vekovius had been told by another employee that the group were making their own games, and he felt that Carmack was generally incapable of lying. Carmack in turn bluntly admitted that they had made Keen with Softdisk computers, that they felt no remorse for their actions, and that they were all planning on leaving. Vekovius felt that

7830-516: Was developed for the Game Boy Color in 2001 by David A. Palmer Productions in association with id Software, and published by Activision . The original trilogy has been released as part of several collections since its first release: the id Anthology compilation in 1996, a compilation release by Apogee in 1998 of Invasion of the Vorticons and Goodbye, Galaxy , a similar compilation in 2001 by 3D Realms titled Commander Keen Combo CD , and

7920-496: Was enhanced by parallax scrolling , which gives an illusion of depth. The background images are presented in multiple layers that scroll at different rates, so objects closer to the horizon scroll slower than objects closer to the viewer. Some parallax scrolling was used in Jump Bug . It used a limited form of parallax scrolling with the main scene scrolling while the starry night sky is fixed and clouds move slowly, adding depth to

8010-404: Was pioneering a model of game publishing in which 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. Romero sent Miller the Mario demo, and the two agreed that Ideas from the Deep would create

8100-448: Was the first publicly available PC platform game to feature smoothly-scrolling graphics. Life (video games) In video games , a life is a play-turn that a player character has, defined as the period between start and end of play. Lives refer to a finite number of tries before the game ends with a game over . Sometimes the euphemisms chance , try , rest and continue are used, particularly in all-ages games, to avoid

#174825