Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter | |
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Developer(s) | id Software |
Publisher(s) | FormGen |
Designer(s) | Tom Hall |
Programmer(s) | John Carmack John Romero Jason Blochowiak |
Artist(s) | Adrian Carmack |
Composer(s) | Robert Prince |
Series | Commander Keen |
Platform(s) | DOS, Windows |
Release | December 1991 |
Genre(s) | Side-scrolling platformer |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter (stylized as Aliens Ate My Babysitter!) is a side-scrolling platform video game developed by id Software and published by FormGen in December 1991 for DOS. It is the seventh episode of the Commander Keen series, though it is numbered as the sixth, as Commander Keen in Keen Dreams is outside of the main continuity. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, as he journeys through an alien world to rescue his kidnapped babysitter. The game features Keen running, jumping, and shooting through various levels while opposed by aliens, robots, and other hazards.
After the success of the three-episode Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, the developers of the game, including programmers John Carmack and John Romero, designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack, left their jobs at Softdisk to found id Software. After making a prototype game in Dreams to develop new ideas such as gameplay changes, graphical enhancements, and artistic improvements, the team worked on making a sequel trilogy of episodes from June to December 1991. During development, the last episode was split off to be released as a stand-alone game due to a deal made by id's new president, Mark Rein, with the remaining two episodes produced as a pair titled Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy instead. Aliens, despite being released as the sixth main episode in the series, was developed before the fifth. It did not sell as well as the first trilogy, which was attributed by id to poor marketing and its awkward status as a stand-alone retail game in a series known for groups of shareware episodes. Although another Keen game was planned, during development id Software began work on Wolfenstein 3D, and its success, along with the development of Doom, led id to not develop any further Keen games.