Commander Keen Goodbye Galaxy2.txt
Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy is a two-part episodic side-scrolling platformer game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in 1991 for DOS. It consists of the fifth and sixth episodes of the Commander Keen series, though they are numbered fourth and fifth, as Commander Keen in Keen Dreamsnie is part of the main continuity. The game follows the eponymous commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius who first travels through the Shadowlands to save the Gnosticens so they can ask the Oracle how the Shikadis plan to destroy the galaxy, and then through Shikadi's Armageddon machine to stop them. The two episodes feature running, jumping and shooting through different levels as opposed to aliens, robots and other dangers.
Following Commander Keen's success in Invasion of the Vorticons, the game's creators including developers John Carmack and John Romero, designer Tom Hall and artist Adrian Carmack, left their jobs at Softdisk to start id Software. After developing a prototype game for Keen Dreams to develop new ideas such as gameplay changes, graphical enhancements such as parallax scrolling, and artistic enhancements, the team worked on the continuation of the episode trilogy from June to December 1991. During development, the last episode was split to be released as a standalone game, Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter, and the other two episodes were produced as a pair instead of a trilogy.
Goodbye, Galaxy initially didn't sell as well as the first trilogy, which the publisher and designer attributed to the lack of a third episode that hurt her given the shareware release model. A couple of episodes, however, have been dubbed "Apogee's Hottest Sellers". Reviews of the series praise the challenge and humor in the graphics and gameplay, especially on Goodbye, Galaxy. Although another Keen game was planned, id Software began work on Wolfenstein 3D during development, and its success, along with the development of Doom, led to the discontinuation of further Keen games.