id Software co-founders confirm that its biggest games’ heroes are all related

Turns out BJ Blazkowicz, Commander Keen, and "Doomguy" could all go to the same family reunion.

Of all the innovations id Software delivered to the video game industry in the '90s, plot certainly wasn't one of them. Still, the company managed to create a few iconic heroes in its PC-action heyday, and decades after their creation, the company's former bigwigs let loose a fun bit of trivia on Tuesday: many of id's biggest heroes are all related.

As spotted by ResetERA, a Twitter conversation unfolded on Tuesday that had been set into motion weeks earlier. A seeming throwaway December post from former id Software designer John Romero included an interesting note: that the long-running Wolfenstein series' hero, BJ Blazkowicz, was "based on" the company's early side-scrolling action series Commander Keen. A fan picked up on this and sent a question to id co-founder Tom Hall: are these two characters related, and is Doom's "Doomguy" hero also part of a genetic lineage?

Hall minced no words in his Tuesday reply: "The lineage isn't a theory. Fact." Longtime id fans might have already suspected this, based on information in a long-ago Wolfenstein hint manual, but this is the first time someone from id has gone to the trouble of confirming that idea. What's more, Romero piped up to clarify the exact makeup of the Blazkowicz clan: the Wolfenstein hero is Commander Keen's grandfather, while Keen is Doomguy's dad. The duo had a bit of a back-and-forth joke chain from there, asking why there was a missing generational badass between Wolfenstein and Keen. Hall claimed that Keen's father was "an awesome, heroic... newscaster" with the stage name of "Blaze," which is where Keen's legal name of "Billy Blaze" came from.

This adds a bit of a macabre angle to the fact that Keen-related Easter eggs could be found in the Doom series, particularly a secret room in Doom II that required you to gorily kill four hanging versions of the original Keen sprite.

Tuesday's trivia tidbit comes after Romero’s admission in July 2017 that he played a key role in the iconic cover art for the first Doom game. That standing-on-corpses, aiming-a-gun pose came because Romero himself jumped into a photo shoot and posed the way he wanted the cover to look. (Doesn’t that kind of make Romero a member of the Blazkowicz clan, then?)
Ultimately, with so little sensible plot connecting these games, the information is more of a fun way to look at those series' connections than a major concept-explaining revelation. It's all much less complicated than, say, the Zelda series chronology, which splits into three discrete timelines after the events of Ocarina of Time.