Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy! Secret of the Oracle

“Puddles and clouds are made of cardboard, the buildings with the moon above them are an illusion” … Did you recognize the quoted verse? It’s a little obsession of mine, a bizarre idea that has been coming back to visit me periodically for years: the song is “Crazy Boy,” written (and then sung) by Samuele Bersani. In short, play Keen and then tell me whether there aren’t far too many similarities: even the dates are there to match up.

Aside from the outlandish ideas, the game we’re talking about today, picked from the archives of RetroEdicola Club, is part of a saga of six titles (plus one apocryphal one, released on Game Boy) that sees us take on the role of an eight-year-old child prodigy, Billy Blaze, secretly intent on defending Earth. Of the two trilogies, my favorite, perhaps the most popular, is definitely the chapter “Secret of the Oracle,” the fourth title and the first in the “Goodbye, Galaxy” trilogy.

At first glance, the plot is the usual cliché, with the hero who does not seek fame and popularity but secretly strikes at crime, and that alone has an appeal that never fades, but it also has a chain of events that traps the player in a well-crafted story. Opposing Billy Blaze, aka Commander Keen, is the alien race of the Vorticons, which, coincidentally, has the goal of destroying nothing less than the entire galaxy: our hero, however, having discovered the threat, uses his incredible intelligence and sets off for Mars, building the legendary “Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket”, a Megarocket made from parts found around the house and… Beans and Bacon!

Nella prima trilogia di Keen “Invasion of the Vorticons” we find ourselves trapped on the Red Planet, intent on, among other things, rebuilding the Megarocket and we also acquire the iconic ‘pogo stick’, only to discover that behind the menacing aliens lies a mysterious “Superior Intelligence”. Back on Earth, which corresponds to the second game, we see Keen defending it from the dangerous cannons that threaten to destroy the eight most important monuments on our planet. In the third chapter, finally, Keen sets off for the Vorticon planet, to discover who this mysterious “Superior Intelligence” is.

Our story begins at this point, with the new trilogy “Goodbye Galaxy!”: thanks to the new Faster-than-Light (a powerful radio assembled at home), intercept the plans of the Shikadi, would you believe it, to destroy the galaxy. In search of help and to get information about the Super Intellect, Keen heads for the planet Gnosticus IV where the Guardians of the Oracle live, but discovers that they are all prisoners.

Esthetically speaking, the game is a spectacle, even if the color palette still reflects the harshness of the colors dictated by the old generation of EGA and CGA graphics cards (all you need to know is that purple was the dominant color), everything works and makes Keen's world something incredibly alien and rubbery: if we add to this an abundance of details, we begin to see how much love was put into its creation. By extension, the audio is no less impressive: especially the FX (sound effects) are so distinctive that they have entered the collective imagination of Dos Gamers.

The gameplay, ignominiously branded “Mario-style,” is instead different and thanks to the little hop (the aforementioned pogo stick) extremely fun gameplay dynamics open up, as well as a tool for reaching the numerous secret passages. After all, labels are worth little, especially in the early ’90s; anything that jumped was “Mario-style”: but trust me, Keen, aside from a few similarities, is a game with its own soul and personality.

Being a DOS game, the keyboard is the main means of control: so Keen jumps with the SHIFT key, shoots with CTRL and uses his pogo stick with the spacebar. As usual, the right and left arrow keys make us move, while the up arrow and down arrow scroll the screen so as to have a wider view of where to head. As a good retro game, Commander Keen is a tough game: few bullets, few lives, and tough enemies that must be killed with varied and desperate techniques. It’s true that you can save at any time, but with great skill the infamous programmers have created many traps that will put us in serious difficulty if we save too close to critical points. However, the challenge factor is not impossible, and the desire to see the whole story will make you persevere, and even when finished, you will often come back to play it again, helped also by the fact that the levels, as mentioned, are not linear, but offer multiple routes.

Pensate that we had to wait years before the final showdown! Indeed, the Keen Saga was incomplete for a long time: at the end of the two trilogies there was supposed to be the grand finale with “The Universe Is Toast”. Unfortunately, the software house Id moved on to other projects, leaving only crumbs in the form of clues about this mysterious enemy. Keen 3’s last boss fight is a gigantic robot, which until the very end we believe is controlled by this entity, but once defeated we discover that it is only an android with the features of a child similar to Keen. There are traces in a letter written in Standard Galactic Alphabet, which illustrates some details of his hatred for the universe, and finally, in Keen 5 his helmet is shown, once again similar to that of our hero, but black with two M’s engraved on it.

Fortunately, a group of daredevils, starting from the original games of the “Goodbye Galaxy” trilogy, modified them to provide a worthy conclusion to the story. Even though we are talking about a fan game, the quality level is kept high and the story is written with great passion for the character: I believe that even the original authors could not have done better than this. In the splendid ending, we discover that Mortimer McMire, a schoolmate and brother of Keen’s babysitter (who is kidnapped in the sixth chapter), is the long-sought rival: endowed with 315 IQ, one point more than Keen, whom he addresses by calling him 314, as it were. He considers all beings inferior, including the loyal Vorticons and the Shikadi, and this is his reason for wanting to destroy the universe.

I have not wanted to reveal all the details of this epic saga, and so we conclude our journey: perhaps we will never know whether Samuele Bersani was inspired or not by this beautiful game for his equally beautiful song, but what we are certain of is the seminal importance of Tom Hall’s game in the “world” of video games: at a time when the PC was beginning to establish itself as a gaming machine, Keen Commander is a splendid manifesto of what a platform game should be: still damn playable today, varied and fun, capable of standing up to many modern titles.