Special Report
PCG INVESTIGATES
APOGEE shook up ’90s PC gaming with disks in Ziploc bags
“Iremember hearing a story that there was a board meeting at Electronic Arts,” Apogee founder Scott Miller says. “One of the top people slammed Wolfenstein 3D on the table and said, ‘How are these guys beating us? How can some little company out of nowhere be making better games than us?’”
For an explanation, you need to return to the mid-1980s. Back then, Miller was coding videogames in his spare time at college and making them available for free. “I had written some text adventure games in the style of Infocom, released those into shareware and asked people to send me money,” he says. “And it just was not working out at all. I wasn’t making anything worth talking about.”
What Miller was missing was an enticement – a way to lure players into payment, without giving away a whole product. In 1987 he put out a trilogy of fantasy roguelikes named Kroz: the first, a 25-level game, was released for free, but the second and third parts cost $15 each. “That was the magic trick that worked,” he says. “No one else was doing that. I immediately wrote another three Kroz games and did the same thing with those.”
By the end of the decade, Miller was making $100,000 a year through cheques showing up in his mailbox. He quit his day job and began reaching out to other game authors through pre-internet services like BBSes and CompuServe. One was Todd Replogle, an “amazing, amazing talent” who dreamed up Duke Nukem with Miller and worked as a programmer on the series from its origin as a platformer through to its final, 3D form.
Another was John Romero. At the time, Romero and the team that would become id Software were pumping out a new game every month for Softdisk, a company that promised subscribers 12 original games over the course of a year for a total of $89.95.
John Carmack had blown Miller away with his demo of a smooth-scrolling platformer on the PC – a feat akin to distilling Super Mario in his garage. But the nascent id Software wasn’t convinced of the merits of shareware. “If you want us to make a game for you,” they told Miller, “you gotta pay us $2,000 to do it.” Miller practically punched the air, knowing he would have gladly paid ten times that amount to publish id’s first game.
KEEN DREAMS
In December of 1990, Miller uploaded Commander Keen’s first episode to bulletin board systems that served as file sharing hosts. For $30, players could order the two follow-up episodes on floppy disks in Ziploc bags. And they did. In droves. By the end of the month, Miller had sent Romero and co $10,000 in royalties.
