commandsKeen port

Alekmaul has done a nice little service for the DS homebrew community . . . he has ported the opensource Clonekeen to the DS. The original Commander Keen was, of course, was one of the first scrolling platformers for the PC, not to mention the start of id software. It’s a nice port, though I’ve not played much of it.

But this raises a question — why don’t devs for these venerable games take advantage of the dev community and throw open the porting of these games to the various platforms, especially if they don’t have plans for porting. Of course, I’m not naive, and I know why they don’t, which ranges from making arrangements with publishers to taking away work from inhouse developers. Still, I think if, say, id announced that they were offering a contest for individuals to port the shareware version of a game, with the winner get either a flat fee or a contract to work on the game port, the homebrew community would respond. Not only might they get some good, optimized solutions, but they would also create a relationship with the community that could have interesting potential.

Of course, with the DS, the problem is that Nintendo frowns upon slot 1 hardware, even suing the r4 manufacturer. The problem is that, to use the revolution metaphor, there are two ways to handle companies like R4 DS — fight them, or bring them into the fold.