![]() ![]() During this time, Doom was becoming a huge hit, and the Id developers broke away from the Wolfenstein II project, saying that they were too busy to continue with it. Their last project together was Wolfenstein II. A second project was Blake Stone and the Aliens of Gold, made by JAM productions, which used the Wolfenstein 3D game engine. The first game, BioMenace by Jim Norwood, was the only finished product to come from a Commander Keen cloning workshop that Id taught to other Apogee developers. So, after a very successful three years, Id and Apogee split up to seek their own fates, but they continued to work on a few projects together. Id’s success gave them enough name recognition and money to distribute its own games. They next created the then state-of-the-art Wolfenstein 3-D, one of the first faux three-dimensional games to capitalize on texture mapping and fast bitmap manipulation. Id cranked out hit after hit, first with the Commander Keen games, a series of side scrollers in the same vein of Sigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario games (see the article “Miyamoto’s World” by David Sheff, June 1994). (See the article “Monsters from the Id: The Making of Doom,” Premier issue, 1994.)Īt the peak of their relationship, Id accounted for about 20% of Apogee’s total revenues. Each letter ended with the message “contact me” and Scott’s phone number. Scott wooed them away from the company they were working for, Soft Disk, by sending them fan letters under fake names. Before the makers of Doom were the masters of all they surveyed in the gaming community, they worked for Apogee. This approach helped Apogee become the shareware game company.īut it wasn’t just creative marketing that made Apogee successful-it was also the ability to spot great talent, such as Id software. To test the software market, he released the first game as freeware and charged for the other two. He developed this style by accident after he regained the rights to three games he had written for Soft Disk. To get the remaining two thirds, players must register for the game. This method consists of making the first third of the game, which contains a subset of the features, unconditionally free. ![]() ![]() One reason behind Apogee’s success is Scott’s “trilogy approach” to game marketing and distribution. ![]() Eventually, Todd left his home in Santa Cruz, Calif., for Dallas, where he worked with Apogee on its first really big hit, Duke Nukem. His game, Caves of Thor, was a prime example of the kind of cutting-edge game Apogee was looking ing for. Todd Raplogle was the first person they signed up. Once they found a cool game, they contacted the authors, signed them up, and handled the distribution and fee collecting. Scott and George scoured the BBSs looking for cool games that just needed that finishing touch to become hits. (The name Apogee came from a band that he had been with in 1982 and fit in with his interest in astronomy.) He repeatedly tried to convince his friend, George Brousard, author of the shareware game Pharaoh’s Tomb, to join him, but George kept his day job until 1991, when he eventually joined Scott as partner in Apogee.Īpogee’s mission was simple: find cool games and distribute them. Although the game was a simple ASCII text adventure, it became so successful that Scott quit his job and formed Apogee Software. It all started in 1987, when Scott Miller was working as a computer consultant and wrote one of the early shareware games for the PC, Kingdom of Kroz. This story is true for a couple of childhood friends from Dallas, Texas, whose company, Apogee Software, has come to dominate the shareware game industry and is now looking to become a major player in the retail channel. Only in America, the legend goes, does the little guy have a chance to hit the big time. In this reprint from the February 1995 issue of Game Developer magazine, editor-at-large Alexander Antoniades describes Rise of the Triad developer Apogee Software's attempt to move beyond shareware development and become a bona fide game studio. ![]()
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