Commander Keen 6 not to get legally?

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candyjack
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Post by candyjack »

That opening dialog used to be a good way to solve your Keen 6 addiction. Just rip the manual in two and burn one of the pieces so you only know the name of half the creatures.
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Post by Levellass »

Nospike wrote:The question depends on what the time is. If you tried it a number of times within a short timespan, you'd get the same creature every time. If you tried again after multiple hours, you'd get something else.
Specifically it changes every hour on a 12 hour cycle. It is of course possible to alter this. Hell even altering Dosbox's clock will do it.
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Post by MoffD »

*Shrugs* Still giving me fleex, I guess it's just a weird coincidence.
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Post by SupFanat »

Everyone along the line, from the programmer to the saleperson who sold it relies on sales of the program for their living
From Commander Keen 6 manual.

If they live from it, why do they simply abandon the program? :confused
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

Because stupid. Look at games like earthBound; sometimes an awesome game series is shelved despite incredible fan demand 'just because'
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Post by Paramultart »

The story of EarthBound baffles me. They scrapped several games in development, and never even bothered making ports of some of their games to market to their English-speaking fan base. It's like they literally just flushed millions and millions of dollars in profit down the toilet at the emotional expense of their dedicated fan base. Meanwhile, Nintendo continues to regurgitate and market their saaaame line of games over and over and over. Then you have Valve that doesn't even care to make Half-Life 3. It doesn't make sense from a business standpoint why you would abandon such a successful franchise.
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Lunick
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Post by Lunick »

Didn't they just add Earthbound to the WiiU last year though?
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Post by Paramultart »

Don't ask me. I've hardly touched the games.
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DHeadshot
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Post by DHeadshot »

My copy of Keen 6 just uses a COM file to get past the copy protection. You don't even have to run the COM file when you start the game - it's called automatically... Both files are just called "Keen6" - no "e" for EGA. Presumably these originally came from some messageboard at some point in their life - I just got them from my friend Bob from back at college, he had a way of finding these things.
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Post by SupFanat »

Well, the problem with Commander Keen 2, 5 and 6 is solved (on Steam).

But Commander Keen 6. It doesn't matter if a floppy with Commander Keen 6 costs $1 or $1000, there aren't as many copies as needed.
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Post by DHeadshot »

2,3 and 5 actually. 6 isn't on Steam.
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Post by SupFanat »

6 is a typo. I know - 2, 3 and 5.
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Post by SupFanat »

Should the copyright holder of Commander Keen 6 have only one purpose - "making it impossible to get a legal copy of Keen 6" - it's nothing good for the community.
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Post by CapnClever »

Hard to know precisely who has the copyright on the game at this point!

Unlike Keens 1-5, which were all published by Apgoee (now 3D Realms), Keen Dreams and Keen 6 had separate publishers: Keen Dreams was published by Softdisk (I believe this was the result of a contract iD Software had with them) while Keen 6 was published by FormGen. FormGen was later bought out in 1996 by GT Interactive, Inc., which was then bought out in 1999 by Infogrames (now Atari, Inc.). Thus, the most likely place to expect the copyright is with Atari, but Atari's a huge company so I wouldn't know where to start. Furthermore, it's possible that the specific rights were moved elsewhere along the way as part of company transfer agreements.

In any case, if Keen 6 is with Atari, I can't imagine Atari caring enough to release anything relating to the game. You could always try to ask anyway!

On the note from previous posts, my copy is like DHeadshot's: named "KEEN6.exe", comes with the copy protection. (No COM file but I know all the names anyway so whatever.) I also have a KEEN6C that didn't have copy protection but I assume I picked that up years ago online somewhere. The KEEN6, by contrast, came from a floppy disk, but my dad told me that the game was purchased via some Canadian distributor and didn't come with a box, so it may not have been a completely official copy. (I do remember having the manual, not that I can find the disks or the manual, go figure.)
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Post by Roobar »

There's hope that Interceptor Entertainment and 3D Realms will sell it on the new 3D Realms site.
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