alt Hacker NewsGame Engine White Papers Commander Keen
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Lovely book. Skimming through it. One thing that might help contextualize it is a brief discussion of the how contemporary hardware like the SNES rendered sprites so efficiently compared to the PC hardware at the time. It's not obvious to modern readers why a PC with significantly more powerful compute capabilities would struggle to keep up with significantly slower Nintendo hardware at the time for sprite rendering.
If you want to play it you can do that here: https://www.playdosgames.com/play/commander-keen-4
Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!
Great write up. Reminds me of Cosmodoc, which is similar source but analyzes Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure instead of Commander Keen.
Would love to hear about the other Apogee and Epic games, like Epic Pinball, Tyrain, Halloween Harry, Jill of the Jungle, Duke Nukem...
Sorry for the "asking for more"-style comment, but it would be amazing if this came in epub and not just PDF.
Of related interest:
Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3 Source Code
https://pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=18248 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46321982)
Another game from the same era: https://cosmodoc.org/
this looks like a copy of fabien's site, plus the topic is very related and likely trampolining on his brand :/
Have LLMs made all arcana about games engineering meaningless?
Masters of Doom is a great book on the history of id software, which includes the origins of the development of smooth scrolling by Carmack and Romero, which was groundbreaking at the time on PC.