Commander Keen for NES?

[dark]

Check out this original ad for Commander Keen that mentions a Keen NES game coming soon.





Probably just a PR thing... Was this concept of an NES Keen game ever heard from again?

[lestagio]

That's a cool find, dark!

It's not surprising that they would think about having an NES port. Dangerous Dave and Commander Keen were showing off how they could do smooth scrolling on PC, just like the NES! Also, some other PC games have had ports. King's Quest V comes to mind.
I did a little bit of searching and I could not find mention of NES Commander Keen anywhere except for fanfic sites.
So yeah, probably just for marketing. But perhaps someone else knows some more.

[Benvolio]

Looks like they had a habit of hyperbolic promotion of future projects. A classic example being the "Fight For Justice" blurb.

[dark]

Looks like they had a habit of hyperbolic promotion of future projects. A classic example being the "Fight For Justice" blurb.

Hehe, I thought about that when I was thinking of the mention in this ad. Its a little wild to say "its coming soon from a major publisher!" when 0 work has been done on it This was Apogee's ad, so maybe a Scott Miller idea rather than an ID Software idea for this one.

By the way, speaking of 8 bit ports of classic dos games, I stumbled upon a Duke Nukem re-skin/romhack of a Sega Master System platform game, the translation of Duke to the SMS looks pretty good actually. (EDIT: NSFW at 8:15, what the heck!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GC0e4iORYY

[Quillax]

Yeah, I've never seen it mentioned anywhere else. I agree with Benvolio on their habit of promoting future projects that don't even get made. I know back in the development of Goodbye Galaxy, they said that they would release VGA versions in addition to the EGA and CGA versions, which likely didn't get very far (although the Keen 7 tech demo might have leftovers from that idea).

Following dark's post about 8-bit ports of DOS games, Dr. Kylestein made a recreation of Crystal Caves on NES. Also, TheBigV was working on an NES port of Dangerous Dave, but I'm not sure about the current status.

I think it would be really neat if someone made an NES port of Keen 1-3, although I'm not sure how feasible it would be. Back in mid-2018, I made a few mockup screenshots for a contest about making retro-style mockups of games on other consoles/systems:



I paid close attention to the limitations of the NES. For example, the symbol on Keen's helmet was changed so that it would stay the same whether Keen faces left or right (NES games flip the sprites rather than use unique sprites for each direction). I remember the color palettes being a real tight squeeze. These mockups actually placed second in the contest!

[dark]

Those screenshots do look like something on the NES, good thinking with the color palettes.

I don't think I ever encountered an NES game where the jumping had a similar feel to that of Keen 1-3. Not sure if that would be an NES limitation as well, or just that ID had a very unique idea about how the jumps would work. I think screen resolution would need to be cut down as well, presumably its 320x240 on the pc, and I think the NES uses something smaller, google is telling me 256x224.

The Crystal Caves NES remake looks very solid!

[Quillax]

Thanks! To further elaborate on the color palettes, the NES could only do up to 4 tile palettes and 4 sprite palettes at once. Each tile palette has 3 unique colors plus a shared background color, while each sprite palette has 3 unique colors plus transparency. Because there are just enough tile palettes to represent all keycard colors, I made my color selections based on that.

Looking back, though, I wouldn't be able to use all 4 keycard colors in Keen 3 if purple was used. One of the colors would either have to be traded out for purple (red would be my pick since it's not used much) or go unused aside from levels where there's no purple. I think Caves of Oblivion is the only Keen 3 level to use all 4 keycards, and there's no purple ground there. I could also just use one shade of purple, but I don't think the ground would look too good like that. Ammo pickups would probably be recolored. Also, I'm not sure why didn't I use the white-and-blue palette for the Vorta-Colas.

I can't think of any NES game that has a wind-up for jumping, but I don't see why it'd be impossible. All you'd have to do is program it so that if the button input is registered and Keen is either standing or walking on the ground, then he goes into wind-up mode. I think Battletoads has a delay between kicking and whatever input is needed for that. The screen resolution on NES is definitely smaller than PC, but I feel like it wouldn't impact Keen too much since it's slower-paced than some of the other NES platformers. Granted, Vorticon Elites and VortiNinjas would be even more of a pain to deal with since you'd have less time to react to them showing up onscreen. Also, if you killed an enemy, scrolled it offscreen, and then came back to where it spawned, would it reappear? Reappearing enemies in that fashion are common in NES games, but I have no clue on whether that's programmed in or just a byproduct of technical limitations.

[Frenkel]

John Carmack, John Romero and Tom Hall on the jumping mechanic in Keen 1.

[Calvero]

I did a little bit of searching and I could not find mention of NES Commander Keen anywhere except for fanfic sites.

We talked about it on this forum back in 2008.