Public Commander Keen Forum

Fond memories of the excitement of downloading Ice Factory - the first fanmade keen level I encountered -probably in the early months of 2001 when modding was not on the scene. Even then levelpacks for Keen1 interested me a lot more than the various fangames that existed at the time. This began the process of downloading material to my grandmother's PC then putting it on diskettes to take home to my PC. Though I was highly lucky in those days to have my own PC as a child, my parents strategically left me offline until about 2006 so as harm could not find its way to me. That is, unless you could classify spending tens of thousands of pre/early teen years alone with archaic software as harmful... i'll leave that up to you guys to contemplate.

Ha!

I remember playing this when it came out! I loved the use of the ice machines. I tried to do something similar in a levelpack that I started making back then, but I never released it.

Quillax wrote: ↑Mon Sep 10, 2018 2:35One thing that I find to be strange, though, was that the gap between the releases of The Ice Factory and Flaose's Original Level Pack is a whole year in addition to four days! Were people busy with other stuff and needed a lot of practice with KeenEdit or what?

The old NetKeen actually preceded The Ice Factory by just over a month. From what I remember, there was more community activity in fangames than mods/levelpacks for a good while (or it was at least 50/50). Look here and order by date:
http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/List_of_fan-games

The first "complete" fangame, Commander Keen 2000, came out at the end of 1998, followed shortly by several more.

Most fangames never did get the Keen mechanics right (with the notable exception of the excellent and still unfinished Isis II), while more and more patching tools were released for modding the original games, and the editors have gotten better, so I suppose it's inevitable that attention shifted to mods more and more.