Public Commander Keen Forum

There's a flyer for the first Keen trilogy on John Romero's site and it says:

Commander Keen will also be available as a Nintendo cartridge, being released soon by a major American Nintendo publishing company.

Does anyone here knows what happened to this cartridge and which major American Nintendo publishing company is referred to?

Wow, that's interesting! I've never heard of that before. Yes, it's a wonder what happened... No idea what company might have been converting it to Nintendo.

Ultra high-speed, smooth animation.





Impressive!

Nice pamphlets, I hadn't seen those before. Coolio stuff. Makes the PC outshine the Amiga.

360° scrolling...

Yeah, they're nice. Perhaps translating the game to Nintendo would've (no doubt) made it even more well-known and made the team stick to TUIT.

KeenRush wrote:made the steam stick to TUIT

I read this, then read it again, then decided it was a Finnish idiom that did not translate to English well at all, before finally realizing it was a typo for team.

Rofl, garg, let me just fix it a bit...

That scan is the only thing I know of that refers to a NES version.
(I only found that scan a few months ago myself.)

I know id tried to sell the engine to Nintendo (or something along those lines) so they could have Mario games on the PC, but Nintendo wasn't interested.
(See old interviews/articles for the exact details.)
Still, this is more like the other way around, so...
As the Finnish say, it makes the steam stick to TUIT.

KeenRush, Keen on PC has 360° scrolling.
It's a 2D game, and behind the plane that is the fourth wall the game can scroll up/down and left/right, or any combination of that... so 360°.
I think maybe you read it as "3D", but the NES wasn't exactly capable of 3D that I know of.

Yeah, I've never seen any mention of Keen on Nintendo, other than this. As you said, yeah, when they got the engine running they thought they could convert Mario to PC or something (glad they didn't get Nintendo's interest, otherwise there might not be Keen). But nothing about plans of porting(? or maybe an all new episode) Keen on Nintendo... Another question to ask Tom.

Retodon8 wrote:I think maybe you read it as "3D", but the NES wasn't exactly capable of 3D that I know of.

Why do you think I read it as that? Why would I have written "360°"? I had to write that because one couldn't copy from the article, it being an image. I was just saying that because DSL was praising the animations.

Retodon8 wrote:I think maybe you read it as "3D", but the NES wasn't exactly capable of 3D that I know of.

Look for 3D World Runner.

Heck, even the Commodore 64 had some 3D games, though it was slow.

Wow. This is the first I've heard of Invasion of the Vorticons on NES (or GB). I can see it now... Keen 3 on the GB... B&W or not, a portable version of the original Keen games would be pretty sweet.

Well playing with an NES controller wouldn't be hard, A to jump, B for pogo, A+B for shooting, Start shows your stats and pressing Select would be like when you press Esc.

Haha, I like how they have people's testimony's (or seems like it), I'm guessing that was before the days of major game reviews?

KeenRush wrote:Why do you think I read it as that? Why would I have written "360°"? I had to write that because one couldn't copy from the article, it being an image. I was just saying that because DSL was praising the animations.

Well, excuuuuuuuuse me, KeenRush!
You mentioned 360° followed with a drooling smiley, so I figured perhaps you misread that as "3D".
A 3D game would be drool-worthy, a but a 360° game would probably just be a port of what we already know.
so I decided to clear that up, just in case.

Hahahaha, that youtube link ftw.

CK Guy wrote:Makes the PC outshine the Amiga.

Sacrilege!