Pixel Art #48 & #49: Duke Nukem & Commander Keen

Duke Nukem (July 1991) and Commander Keen (Dec 1990) were among some of the earliest games that I got into when our family purchased our first computer, an IBM that ran Windows 3.1. I learned a lot about computers that year. MS-DOS was required to boot Windows, so I was constantly exploring the command prompts to see what sort of things our new system could do. I think I only accidentally formatted the hard drive just one time.

With no internet, installing a new game meant inserting of a series of floppy disks into an external floppy disk drive and sometimes manually copying files onto your hard drive. “Shareware,” games distributed by companies for free, were all the rage, so it was common for people to exchange copies of the games with each other via their own personal floppy disks. Often, only the first “episode” or two might be available in these games. After completion, you would be prompted to mail a check to the company to purchase the rest of the game (no one ever did this).

Both Duke Nukem and Commander Keen were some of the first games to utilize “parallax scrolling” where gameplay would seamlessly scroll to the right without having to load more screens (like seen in early single-screen arcade games). This meant that computer games could now look and feel like the Nintendo and Sega titles that had been dominating the market at the time.

I enjoyed the games simply because they were colorful, and they were the only games I owned on PC that had a sense of progression. Thus, those images triggered some major nostalgia when revisiting them. I had to add some pixel art of these guys to my collection. Keep scrolling to see what I made!

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Step 1: Outline in black!

Step 2: Add some color!

Step 3: Create a background!

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