Originally I had signed up for this Day Thread hoping to put pictures of something cool I saw on vacation in it, but I ended up having no time, so instead of Sagrada Familia or Pompeii or something I went with something a little less culturally important.

 

This green guy is a Dopefish. It’s the second dumbest creature in the universe, and its only thought pattern is “swim swim hungry, swim swim hungry.”

He lives in the Well of Wishes in the 1991 DOS game Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy. Commander Keen was a series of sidescrolling platformers that grew out of an attempt to replicate Super Mario Bros.’s gameplay on the PC. The developers at Apogee tried to sell Nintendo on the idea of making a Super Mario Bros. port or PC game with this technology, but were refused, so instead they created their own game series. Commander Keen bears some similarities to the console platformers that were extremely popular at the time, but has its own charm and a few unique features such as Keen’s difficult-to-control pogo stick.

The Dopefish only appears in the one level, and all it does is swim around and try to eat Keen. It can’t be killed, so the best way to deal with it is to slip by when it’s eating one of the schoolfish that populate the level. When it eats a fish, it turns to the camera and burps.

Despite having only a brief appearance, the stupid green fish and its simple life mantra of “swim swim hungry” became a kind of in-joke for PC game fans. It made appearances as an easter egg in several id Software games like Quake and even notorious flop Daikatana.

It’s also slated to appear in the new Commander Keen free to play mobile abomination they announced at E3, but let’s not talk about that.