Rejected Commander Keen 1 Title Screen

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Lava89
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Rejected Commander Keen 1 Title Screen

Post by Lava89 »

I was on the Keen wiki the other day and noticed this rejected Keen 1 title from the Vorticons development page, that originally came from the 3D Realms site. So far the clearest image I can find is this horribly compressed JPEG:

Image.

So I was wondering if anyone has one that's of better, if not bitmap-level of quality?
If not, I might try to make a "clean" version in my free time.
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Post by Keening_Product »

If it comes to it, the Trace Bitmap tool in Inkscape is handy.
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Post by Paramultart »

That copy looks good enough to convert to EGA.

Get guynitoren (or however you spell it) to do it. He's good at stuff like that.
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Post by Benvolio »

It really looked a lot more 80s-ish and a lot less Keenish than the finished product. I'm glad they used the title screen that they did.

I wonder, why they didn't use a full screen title screen when it is so easy to make one? It would make a miniscule impact on-disk, and hardly much of an impact in RAM either, especially as computers came with approx 1mb ram by the time 1990 had rolled around. Perhaps time constraints were too great on the production team, or perhaps they didn't have the pixel artistry available that they did by the time they got to Goodby Galaxy.
Last edited by Benvolio on Mon Jun 01, 2015 21:39, edited 1 time in total.
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troublesomekeen
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Post by troublesomekeen »

Unfortunately I unable to requantize this image for a quick clean up. :(
Image
Commander Keen in... Canteloupe Quest!
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Post by Fleexy »

Windows XP Paint for the win:

Image

The capital M's look a little weird, but they were like that in the original (I think).
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Post by Flaose »

Benvolio wrote:Perhaps time constraints were too great on the production team, or perhaps they didn't have the pixel artistry available that they did by the time they got to Goodby Galaxy.
From what I understand, Adrian Carmack only started doing art for id during the production of Keen 2 and 3, and even then he was a rookie so that may explain the huge jump in pixel art skills.
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Lava89
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Post by Lava89 »

Wow! That looks great Fleexy! You pretty much did what I would've done.

I have downloaded and added it to my collection :D

@Flaose: Yeah, from what I recall, Adrian's biggest contribution to Keen 3 were the Vorti-ninjas....which happen to have a rather cartoonish death animation, that doesn't fit with the rest of Keen 1-3 but does jive more with the style that 4-6 would adopt.
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