Bethesda seems to have stopped developing Commander Keen mobile game

Bethesda seems to have quietly removed most references to the mobile reboot of the classic game title Commander Keen announced last year. The announcement was widely criticized.

According to Twitter user Nitomatta developer ZeniMax Online Studios has officially dropped the Commander Keen mobile game, but there doesn’t seem to be an official announcement that the game has been discontinued yet. However, the game’s website has disappeared and all social media channels for the game have also been stopped.

The announcement trailer is no longer available on YouTube and the game is no longer in the list of games Zenimax Online Studios is working on, while it was there a month ago. The Commander Keen page is still on the Play Store, with December being the month of the last update and some mostly negative reviews from likely a beta late last year.

Bethesda announced at last year’s E3 that it was working on a reboot of Commander Keen for smartphones. That announcement received a lot of criticism, partly because of the big difference in gameplay compared to the original; the mobile game features a system of cards and turn-based battles.

The first Commander Keen games were platform games for MS-DOS, created by id Software and published by Apogee Software, which later became 3D Realms. The games were a huge success in the early 1990s.