Vorticon VI 

Xkylyr: 
Originally I bought the full version of Crystal Caves. It came with the shareware episode of Commander Keen Episode1. I first tried it and was revolted by his "lousy control" and threw the disk in a box, forgetting all about it.  A bit later (I believe when I was 9), my dad comes home with the Radio Shack package of Commander Keen 6. needless to say I fell in love immediately! Shortly thereafter, I bought the rest of the games, and beat them all... 

Keenboy: 
When I was little my dad got pirated Commander Keen versions off the internet and I played them. I didn't know what piracy was back then, and I don't think he knew they were pirated because he got them off a bulletin board back in those days. I think I got to the last level cause I remember playing it, but I can't remember how I got to it. 

Ilsoap: 
OK, I came to know Keen when I was 10. (I'm 17 now.) That's when we bought a 286 computer. Really low-tech, black and white screen, whatever. But there were a few good games on the computer, one of them was Commander Keen 1. I passed the level and learned pretty much all the secrets. Then in 1994 my cousins got a better computer, that had version 1, 3, 4, 5, and Dreams! I couldn't believe there were so many. I gradually became a very big fan. Then, when I discovered there was such a big fan club on the internet I thought two things... one, this is cool; and two, do these people have lives? (thankfully they do, so I stayed) 

Tim: 
Well, I first saw the demo for Aliens Ate My Babysitter at Wal-Mart, and bought it because it looked fun to play.  Later, on the first shareware game CD that I got, it had Commander Keen Episode 4 shareware, and later, I got Goodbye Galaxy (both episodes 4 and 5) from Wal-Mart, saw Episode 6 again, but this time was the full version, it was at Radio Shack, it even had the little watch that came with those with it.  I really liked the games, and went to the Apogee thing on AOL, where basically I figured out a whole bunch of stuff I didn't know about, like that he moons you and stuff.  I gathered my knowledge of the questions that were most asked, and made a FAQ type of thing, which would have worked out great except for one thing... AOL users aren't known for intelligence, and having the posts dated in reverse date order didn't help, so it had the earliest first, latest last, so you'd have to click more a bunch of times to see the last post.  Needless to say, nobody ever got to read mine except for the regulars who always read them anyways, and didn't need info from my FAQ, oh well.  I eventually learned about how you can do Ctrl-T to look at all the sprites in the game, and when put to use alongside my screen-shot taking program I had (Screen Thief), I took a bunch of pictures, cropped them, and made 
animated GIFs and put some of my info I had accumulated along with the really cool animated GIFs and made a web page for all the keen games.  I at one time was making a screensaver saver using a program I found that lets you do almost anything you want to do in a screensaver (not just bounce a  picture around like most customized ones do), but it doesn't let you do really complicated ones, like I wanted to do, probably registering would make it do more, but with no job, that wasn't an option, there really wasn't much happening with keen that interested me, so I haven't worked on my Commander Keen web site in a long time, but I will when A) I get a scanner, and can scan in the boxes I have or B) find a better screensaver program that I like, or C) make a doom patch or even full game 
based on it or something, but that would take a while, since I am a perfectionist, and I don’t like Klik and Play like some people do, so if I did a doom thing, I'd edit the source code and optimize it for keen, and let Bloogs and most of the other characters be a playable character or something, I could also do this with Wolfenstein 3D, but it would be more work for me to do to make it in the Wolfenstein 3D engine (I’d want multiplayer with all the characters like I said), and I know nothing of Quake, so that's out of the question unless I suddenly take a liking to it. 

Thea: 
Well, it all started when I was 13 (summer 1996). I was on a bilingual-cultural exchange to a place near Quebec City (March 1996). She had a computer, and Commander Keen 1. I was hooked, but I had one week. Later that summer I had an accident and broke my ankle. We went to a mall in Ottawa, and I saw Commander Keen 1 for sale. We bought it, and later on (December 1996) we bought Commander Keen 4 in Montreal. I couldn't get enough, and got online for Commander Keen. That's how I found Gert's and Geoff's site, and frequented the messageboard (mid 1997). 

Gert: 
Well, just after the first release I got hold of a copy on a computer fair. I got me a copy there. And after playing it, I wanted to have the rest too. And yes....in a few months there was Commander Keen 2! It was Commander Keen who got me into platform games. Well, in a few years I had them all. And when I searched the internet in those days, there were just two sites about Commander Keen. Geoff's was one of them. 

Nin: 
One of my friends had that game, and we played it all the time. then she copied it into my computer and that's the way it is....  

Orb: 
It was just a normal night, and my best friend was spending it with me.  He had brought over some of his favorite games on floppy disks. He had lots that took ten floppies, but he had only one that took one floppy. Guess what that was? Commander Keen: Secret of the Oracle. I said thanks, we took him home, and I came home and installed it, thinking I'd get a crappy overhead pac-man like game. Keep in mind that I had just gotten a computer then, so I didn't know about Quake. I ran it. I saw that friendly-looking ball bouncing around, and I thought that looks could be deceiving. ZZAP! He was stunned. It took me five minutes to figure out how to jump and twenty to find out about pogo. Fifteen additional minutes and I was in a hut, then five minutes later it was bedtime. I still hadn't beaten the first level. Pretty pitiful. Now I can beat it in the time it takes Commander Keen to just move that far. That night I actually dreamed about Commander Keen. A little red ball squished me and I woke up to birds chirping outside my window. I ran downstairs and started playing again. Thirty minutes later I beat the first level. A month later, I beat the game using only the [BAT] cheat, as I did not know that there were others. I then got internet about Half a year later, and the first thing I searched for was Commander Keen. Up came Cerebral Cortex 314, except that wasn't its name back then. I got it, and downloaded the rest of them. I loved them. I guess the reason I got hooked was its originality. If it had been Marooned on Mars that I first played, I probably wouldn't have liked it, since it is, compared to The Secret of the Oracle, pretty crappy. Commander Keen just has a wholesome, non-violent air around it. That's what makes a game good. The old-fashioned platform style, but with good graphics, original enemies, and ingenious storyline.