Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy

Plot

The game is split into two episodes: Secret of the Oracle and The Armageddon Machine. In the first episode, eight-year-old Billy Blaze, having defeated the Grand Intellect in Invasion of the Vorticons, builds a faster-than-light communications radio. He hears a transmission that the Shikadi plan to destroy the galaxy, dons his helmet as Commander Keen, stuns his parents with a neural stunner as they call him to dinner, and flies to Gnosticus IV, home of the Oracle and the Gnosticenes.

A Council Page tells him the Gnosticenes have been kidnapped by the Shikadi to the Shadowlands far to the west. Keen journeys through the Shadowlands, rescues all the Gnosticenes, and they activate the Oracle machine. The Oracle reveals the Shikadi are shadow beings from the far side of the galaxy building an Armageddon Machine at Korath III to blow up the galaxy and rebuild it. Keen sets off to stop them.

In The Armageddon Machine, Keen travels through the Armageddon Machine space station, destroying its subsystems. He learns the Shikadi are led by the Gannalech. After destroying the Quantum Explosion Dynamo, the Shikadi flee; depending on whether Keen destroys a fuse in the secret level, they either escape via getaway ship or are stranded. In the control room, Keen finds a note in the Standard Galactic Alphabet from Mortimer McMire, his school rival with an IQ a single point higher.

The note reveals that the McMire killed in the previous game was an android, that Gannalech is a mispronunciation of Grand Intellect, and that the Armageddon Machine was a distraction while McMire plans to destroy the universe. As Keen leaves, the screen focuses on an abandoned football helmet with two Ms on it.

Development

In October–December 1990, a team from Softdisk called Ideas from the Deep developed Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons. The group, working at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana, consisted of programmers John Romero and John Carmack, designer Tom Hall, artist Adrian Carmack, and manager Jay Wilbur. After the game's release and the arrival of a $10,500 royalty check from Apogee Software, the team quit Softdisk to found id Software. As part of a settlement for using work computers, they agreed to make games for Softdisk's Gamer's Edge service.

They created a prototype, Commander Keen in Keen Dreams, to fulfill obligations and improve the next Keen games. For Invasion of the Vorticons, John Carmack and Romero focused on programming; Adrian Carmack joined late with a personal art style that did not match, so designer Tom Hall shaped the game based on his experiences. Keen's red sneakers and Green Bay Packers helmet were items Hall wore as a child; dead enemies left corpses because Hall believed child players should learn death has permanent consequences; enemies were based on his reading of Sigmund Freud's theories.

The team reprised their roles for Keen Dreams and Goodbye, Galaxy, with programmer Jason Blochowiak added for Goodbye, Galaxy. They changed the engine and design: increased graphical quality, pseudo-3D view instead of side-on, ramps, sound card support, and design changes from player feedback. Level maps were made with a custom program called Tile Editor (TEd), first created for Dangerous Dave and used for the entire Keen series. The working title was Commander Keen II – Goodbye Galaxy.

Legacy

After Goodbye Galaxy, id Software only co-developed one more Commander Keen game, Aliens Ate My Babysitter. A follow-up trilogy called The Universe Is Toast was set for December 1992 but got scrapped because Wolfenstein 3D took off and the team shifted to Doom. Later, GT Interactive proved its reliability to id by moving 30,000 copies of Goodbye Galaxy quickly, which helped it land the Doom II publishing deal. A final Keen title for the Game Boy Color arrived in 2001, made by David A. Palmer Productions with id and put out by Activision.

Goodbye Galaxy has been bundled multiple times: in the 1996 id Anthology, a 1998 Apogee pack with Invasion of the Vorticons, the 2001 Commander Keen Combo CD from 3D Realms, and the 2014 3D Realms Anthology. It also reached modern systems through a DOS emulator and has been on Steam since 2007 as part of the Commander Keen Complete Pack; by June 2016, Steam Spy estimated about 200,000 copies had been sold there. The Dopefish, a creature from Secret of the Oracle labeled "the second-dumbest creature in the universe" and described by designer Tom Hall as "just a stupid green fish," became a running joke across the video game industry and has popped up in dozens of other titles.