What's the legal status for this game? Since the Steam package isn't including it, for some weird reason, I guess it's abandonware? Or can we still buy it somewhere? IIRC 3DR isn't selling CKVI in their Keen bundles either.

I think that one had a different publisher(Formgen) that the rest of the series .

I am not sure about this, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems that, thanks to some distribution deals back in the day, the rights to sell this particular game lie with Apogee(3D Realms)/ Formgen, while the rights to the Commander Keen IP in and of itself are owned by Id. That's a possible explanation for why it's not being sold anywhere.

As far as I remember Keen 6 started with the Apogee splash screen, so I'd guess the distribution rights at least are theirs. Whether or not they still hold them or are released back to ID is anyone's guess, but I very much doubt it is legal abandonware.

There's no such thing.

3D Realms don't sell it on their site, so I doubt they have any claim on this anymore. At least according to Wikipedia, they only distributed the game with the publishing rights being owned by Formgen. Formgen was later bought by GT Interactive and GT Interactive was later bought by Infogrames, which is now Atari. Needless to say, involve more than one companies into the mix and the chances of an old game being re-released have officially decreased by a lot.

What a mess..

Well, even if 3D Realms had the rights to the game, they probably wouldn't be able to sell it unless they made some sort of licensing agreement with Id in order to be able to use the name, images etc. of the Commander Keen franchise; but yeah, I already suspected that this is one of those obscenely complicated rights situations

Thing is, 3D Realms is already selling the other Commander Keen episodes (1-5) and Wolfenstein 3D on their website. They are even showing pictures of games they once published, but can no longer sell themselves (Max Payne 1+2, Prey), but the 6th episode of Commander Keen is nowhere to be found, which reinforces my theory that they never had the rights to that one.

I could always buy it on eBay. But I have no Floppy drive.

I am an idiot. I seriously didn't realize that 3DR sells those games.

There is no Keen 6. The Keen series was episodes 1-5 with a 6th planned for later. But that was never made because iD shifted resources over to Wolfenstein 3D and the like.

There were a couple of other Keen games, Aliens Ate My Babysitter and Keen Dreams were others. But, they weren't connected to episodes 1-5 as they didn't have anything to do with that plot arch.
You must be rich, the only copy I see on eBay is $500.

I'm pretty sure no one would blame you for getting a "less than 100% legal" copy of the game off the internet. It's available on at least one major "abandonware" site and even a Commander Keen fansite hosts a download because of all this.

True that of course. But at the same time I want it to feel like it's really mine, you know?

Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter! is Keen 6. For commercial reasons the second trilogy was split into the shareware release, Goodbye, Galaxy! (Keens 4 and 5), and a commercial only release, Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter! (Keen 6).

The distribution rights to Keen 6 are (as far as I know) held by Atari, SA. Good luck getting anything out of them, though.