In October 1990 Orson Scott Card told COMPUTE!’s readers where to send their money for a series of PC games called Kroz: to Apogee Software, 4206 Mayflower, Garland, Texas. “Apogee Software sounds like a corporation,” he added, “until you realize that it consists entirely of Scott Miller.” Miller wrote the games, copied every disk himself with batch files, and gave the first game of each trilogy away. Within two years the one-man company was publishing Wolfenstein 3D, and a few years after that it had grown into 3D Realms, the studio behind Duke Nukem 3D.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1987, by Scott Miller, with Kingdom of Kroz.
- Base: Garland, Texas.
- Selling method: the “Apogee Model”: the first part of a series was shareware, free to copy, and players bought the rest from Apogee.
- Published: id Software’s Commander Keen (1990–91) and Wolfenstein 3D (1992); its own Duke Nukem (1991), Duke Nukem II (1993) and Rise of the Triad.
- Became: 3D Realms, first a label for its 3D games from 1994, then the name of the whole company. The Apogee name returned in 2021 as Apogee Entertainment.
Kroz and the trilogy
Card described the Kroz games as mazes, traps, monsters and spells, drawn entirely in the IBM PC’s standard character set: the player was a yellow smiley face, and the monsters were Greek letters. He compared the play to Lode Runner. The name was Zork spelled backwards.
Miller’s method was to write three games at once and release one of them as shareware. Shareware libraries passed it on free to their members, and the free game was complete: “If you’re content with just one Kroz game, you never have to pay.” The other two came only from Miller, at $20 for a trilogy with hint books and maps, or $7.50 a game. His marketing department, Card wrote, “is huge but costs him nothing”. Miller was taking 50 to 60 orders a week, with highs over 200, and had moved into a flat of his own because the business had taken over his parents’ house.
Shareware itself was not new: programs such as PC-Talk and PC-Write had been asking users to pay since the early 1980s (see Shareware). What Apogee changed was the offer. Instead of asking for a donation for the program you already had, it sold you the rest of the series. Computer Gaming World later called this “The Apogee Model” and dated it to Kingdom of Kroz in 1987. By 1990, the magazine said, it was earning Miller up to $2,000 a week, and he gave up his day job.
Other Apogee games worked the same way. In March 1991 Computer Gaming World reviewed Pharaoh’s Tomb, whose first part “comes as shareware and can be found for downloading on virtually every major bulletin board and service (CompuServe, GEnie, Executive Network, for example)”. After 20 levels, the reviewer noted, most players found themselves “hooked”, and four more games followed for those who paid.
Commander Keen and id Software
Miller looked for other programmers to publish. He liked the games John Romero was writing for Softdisk’s monthly disks, but Softdisk screened its staff’s post, so Miller wrote Romero a series of fan letters under different names. Romero pinned them to his wall before he noticed that they all came from the same address. Miller then proposed that Romero let Apogee distribute a game. In Miller’s telling to Computer Gaming World, Romero wanted money up front and asked for $3,000: “It was almost all the money I had. I only had $5,000 in the bank.”
The result was Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, which Apogee published in December 1990, the first episode free and the others for sale. Its programmers, John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack, left Softdisk on 1 February 1991 and founded id Software. Apogee released more Keen episodes, and on 5 May 1992 it published Wolfenstein 3D, again with a shareware first episode. Computer Gaming World wrote that it “single-handedly propelled id and Apogee into the big leagues”. Tom Hall recalled that Keen “made good money”, and Wolfenstein 3D “made TEN TIMES that”.
id published Doom itself, and Apogee lost its most successful developer. Computer Gaming World wrote that Miller and company “suddenly found themselves without a game, a development team or an engine”. Apogee licensed the Wolfenstein 3D engine from id for Blake Stone, which the magazine thought looked and played like a hasty copy of Wolfenstein, and which started Apogee’s reputation as a copycat. It did better with Rise of the Triad, on sale by the start of 1995, which could be played over a network or by modem and let the player fly.
Duke Nukem
Apogee’s own star was Duke Nukem. Miller told Edge that he and Todd Replogle created the character in 1990. The first Duke Nukem, a side-scrolling shooter in EGA graphics, came out as shareware in mid-1991, and was in Miller’s words “the biggest shareware success until Wolfenstein 3D’s release a year later”. Duke Nukem II followed late in 1993, and early in 1994 Replogle began work on a third game using the Build engine, written by the teenage programmer Ken Silverman.
From Apogee to 3D Realms
Apogee set up 3D Realms to make 3D games. Edge, visiting the company in the suburbs of Dallas in 1995, described 3D Realms as “the new-software arm of shareware giant Apogee”, launched “as an offshoot of Apogee” for 3D development. Its first game was Terminal Velocity (1995), developed by Terminal Reality. George Broussard was 3D Realms’ president; Miller was its vice-president and, as Edge put it, “confusingly, Apogee’s co-president”. Broussard explained why the company still used shareware: “it was an inexpensive way to get started.”
The Build engine game was Duke Nukem 3D, released as shareware in 1996. By May Computer Gaming World was writing that Doom’s reign had “suddenly been challenged”. The game’s sexual content was controversial, and Miller defended it: most of the films he wanted to see were R-rated, he said, so “why should we make PG-rated games?” Later that year the company dropped the Apogee name and traded as 3D Realms. The last game published as Apogee was Stargunner (1996).
Later history
The 3D Realms story, from Duke Nukem Forever to its sale in 2014 and its purchase by Embracer Group in 2021, is told in the 3D Realms entry.
The Apogee name had a life of its own. In 2008 3D Realms licensed the name, the back catalogue and the logo to Terry Nagy, who set up Apogee Software LLC to republish the old games. In April 2021 Miller and Nagy bought the Apogee name from 3D Realms and relaunched the company as Apogee Entertainment.
Sources
- Orson Scott Card, COMPUTE! issue 122, October 1990, p. 74: Kroz, its character-set graphics, the trilogy method, the prices, Apogee’s Garland address and one-man operation, the weekly orders and the move out of his parents’ house.
- Computer Gaming World issue 80, March 1991, p. 63: Pharaoh’s Tomb review (the shareware first game, the bulletin boards, “hooked”, the four follow-up games).
- Chris Lombardi, Computer Gaming World issue 120, July 1994: id Software feature (Miller’s fan letters to Romero, written under different names from the same address).
- Edge issue 24, September 1995, pp. 36–37: 3D Realms as Apogee’s “new-software arm” and offshoot for 3D games, Terminal Velocity and Terminal Reality, Broussard and Miller’s titles, the shareware quotation, the Build engine and Ken Silverman.
- Ken Brown, “Duking It Out”, Computer Gaming World issue 142, May 1996: “The Apogee Model” and Kingdom of Kroz in 1987, earnings by 1990, Miller’s account of the Keen deal, Jay Wilbur’s quotation, “single-handedly propelled”, the loss of id, Blake Stone and Rise of the Triad, the 3D Realms division and Terminal Velocity, Duke Nukem 3D and Miller’s defence of its content.
- Computer Gaming World issue 126, January 1995: Rise of the Triad in the magazine’s price listings.
- Edge issue 65, December 1998, p. 77: interview with Scott Miller (Duke Nukem’s creation with Todd Replogle in 1990, the first two games, and the start of Duke Nukem 3D).
- For id Software’s founding and release dates and Tom Hall’s recollection, see the id Software entry and its sources.
- “3D Realms”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Kingdom of Kroz on 26 November 1987 as the first game under the Apogee name, the change of name in 1996 and Stargunner as the last Apogee release, the 2008 licence to Terry Nagy, and the 2021 relaunch as Apogee Entertainment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Realms