Written by: Stoo
Date posted: August 7, 2020
If I recall right, over the years most of the Keen series has been readily available to us. Games One and Four were shareware and the rest of them up to number Five could be bought directly from Apogee/3D Realms. Later on iD published them directly through Steam and gog.com.
Keen Dreams however has been a lot harder to find. Apogee couldn’t publish it as the rights belonged to Softdisk, who appear to have moved away from publishing games, and then disappeared altogether sometime in the 2000s. So for many years, only abandonware sites were keeping the game alive. In time, it came to be known as “The Lost Keen”.
Then 2015 it emerged from the wilderness. An independent developer going under the title of Hard Disk Publishing had acquired the rights financed partially by a crowdfunding campaign. He proceeded to release it on Steam. Good news, surely? Guy does retro gamers a favour, brings the Lost Keen back to us all using the power of digital distribution?
Yet from here the story takes a weird turn, involving some disturbing behaviour from the Hard Disk guy. He was extremely hostile to negative reviews of his games, posted hate speech and then to cap it all off he insulted Valve overlord Gabe Newell. Unsurprisingly, he was booted from Steam and his games were removed from the store (although still accessible to those who had already bought them). It’s sad that this little piece of iD’s history was caught up in such an unpleasant situation.
Later in 2017 Keen Dreams was restored to Steam. It had been rescued by Night Dive Studios, those champions of lost and abandoned games. However, as of 2019, it had disappeared again. This time, I can’t find any reason why. So the Lost Keen is Lost again. Hopefully, Night Dive will deal with whatever issue is holding them back. For now, you could find a copy at myabandonware.com
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