Apogee: Man Orchestra and Online Game Publisher 1987
In the late 1980s in Texas, a young man of more than twenty years old named Scott Miller created a business model that changed the way people buy and sell digital products around the world. Miller himself called his masterpiece "Apogee model" - "apogee model", the rest of it is today known as "shareware", or "shareware." This model has made digital sales through the Internet enormously profitable, and Miller himself is a millionaire. The model and its author had to revolutionize the way the Internet is used — even before much of the world knew about its existence.
In his youth, Scott Miller was lazy.
In high school in the early 1980s, he, a retired teenager, escaped from the hot Texas sun, hiding in the campus of a computer lab, spending all his time programming long text adventure quests. Here he met George Broussard - another teenager, who at that time stood out only for his love of wearing shorts all the time. As often happened at that time, the guys were united among themselves by a friendly admiration for the local Apple II computer.
After graduation, Miller and Broussard both went to work at the local slot machine hall, which was called the Twilight Zone. Since the work turned out to be dusty, Miller could not only find time to attend college, but also got the freedom to improve in the latest video games. Every day Miller and Broussard competed against each other for machine guns, trying to beat each other's records in the tables of the best players.
')
Miller was expelled from second-year University of Dallas and allowed video games to grow through his life as if a weed grows in a garden. He practiced games all week, and on weekends he participated in local gaming tournaments, earning a modest additional income and gradually gaining a reputation among a small but friendly community of gaming enthusiasts. The rest of the time he was programming.
After Miller finished high school, his parents left to live back in Australia, where his father worked. And Scott, having stayed in Texas and having lost the comfort of his childhood home that had become empty, lived a life-dream of a young nerd.
Scott Miller wanted to earn more. Not without the help of Broussard, he wrote a guide on how to win in popular video games - as it turned out later, just to find out that the market is already overflowing with similar game guides, among which his work is simply lost. Nevertheless, the publication of the book brought another unexpected result - Miller was entrusted with keeping a weekly column in the Dallas Morning News newspaper. For the next four years, a young video game lover will be writing reviews for a popular local newspaper, sometimes making part-time work on individual niche gaming magazines. His earnings continued to remain modest - the money was just enough to make it to the next payment.
At night, Miller continued to program.
And so, in 1987, after several years of work, the ego finally woke up in professional criticism: he finally realized that he was able to make games that would be no worse than those he wrote about every week. So began the career path of Miller as a game developer and self-publisher.
“I remember how Scott worked from his parents' home,” his colleague Terry Nagy later recalled. “He was seriously proud that he could get a 16.5K modem that allowed him to communicate with game designers from around the world.”
At first, Miller hoped that he could sell his games in a more traditional way: sign a contract with a publisher who could record games on carriers, distribute them and promote them in retail.
Most publishers ignored Miller’s suggestion; those who did respond flatly refused to enter into a contract with an amateur designer. After all, he was just an ordinary guy with no higher education or experience in the gaming industry, and was known as a critic, not as a programmer. Even at the dawn of game design, in the 1980s, there was already a line between those who made the games and those who wrote about them.
But what was even worse - Miller did ASCII games that used letters, numbers and symbols instead of graphics - and this did not interest investors who were looking for a “new big hit”. Publishers wanted a large and experienced team of designers who worked on something intriguing — something that immediately captured the attention of those who regularly flipped through stacks of PC gaming magazines.
Miller was going to publish his own games on the media on his own, but he knew that the cost of printing products would cost him a lot of money and would be overwhelming - moreover, he lacked contacts even at the lowest level, in stores and other retail chains.
But Miller had another plan, from which his colleagues tried to dissuade him to the last. The developer could allow anyone to download his games for free through electronic bulletin boards (BBS) and voluntarily donate.
At that time, it was this software distribution method that served as the definition of the shareware model - then it was that everyone could copy and distribute the game for free.
Miller made his bet on the shareware model and waited for the results.
He released two text quests, Beyond the Titanic and Supernova . The games were warmly received by the BBS community, but donate proved to be financially inconsistent. (According to Miller, the total income from both games could not reach $ 10,000)
When finances came to an end, Miller left writing and got a full-time tech support for a computer consulting company. At night and on weekends, he continued to program and make new useful contacts. At BBS, Miller met with a community of designers like him who dreamed of becoming professionals. As he managed to find out, none of those who adhered to the shareware model, could not earn any substantial money.
"Absolutely everyone believed that the release of games online can not bring money," as Miller will say many years later.
Miller's next game was a technological leap over his past text adventures: it was the Kingdom of Kroz , an ASCII adventure game from 60 levels. Proud of his brainchild, Miller could not bring himself to freely distribute Kroz . This time he chose a different strategy: his own.
Miller broke Kroz into three "collections" of levels, which he called episodes. The first episode could be downloaded via BBS for free. When the player finished passing this piece, a splash screen with a return Miller mail address appeared. If a player wanted to complete the Kroz quest, then he had no choice but to send him a check to the creator.
The two remaining episodes, Caverns of Kroz and Dungeons of Kroz, could be purchased separately or all together (with a small discount). Buying episodes was also considered a product registration, so the player was able to contact the technical support of the game and get access to special cheat codes.
Miller began to receive an average of $ 1,000 per week in checks.
So overnight the amateur designer became a professional publisher; and since each publishing company is supposed to have a name, Scott also had to choose - but he did not have to think long. Let Miller today call his idea just “marketing magic”, but at that time he preferred to call it “the model of the apogee”.
Mail was the worst possible way of accepting orders, but the newly-baked entrepreneur then could not afford anything else because he did not have a phone number for the company.
In June 1990, Miller released the new Kroz trilogy - and now he has started earning about $ 2,000 a week. After making sure that the written checks are stably stored on his desk, Miller left his former low-paying job in technical support and engaged exclusively in the development of games.
“I would not say that some special enlightenment came to me then,” Miller says, “I just knew that the online release of games would not work ... It seemed to me that the release of the advertising version was a reasonable step. My expectations were not really too high. ”
Today, Miller says that Broussard has always been on his heels. According to him, Broussard did not take seriously the development of the game until he saw how much money Miller earns. Without thinking twice, Broussard founded his company Micro F / X, whose motto was “Micro F / X Software, a leading shareware game developer!”.
At the same time, Miller did not have enough time to be a game developer and a publisher at the same time - even though he devoted all his days to these activities all the time. So a year later, he invited Broussard to join Apogee Software Ltd. as a partner and co-owner, making him a Micro F / X trustee.
Miller at that time completed his first home and moved into it, along with his parents, who then returned from Australia. Early Apogee looked exactly like this: two adult men discussed the great future of their company, the entire industry and the world, and when they were not at home, Miller's mother answered calls from players instead of technical support.
In 1991, Miller and Broussard rented an office on Broadway Blvd. in Garland in Texas. Their first office was small, but there was enough space for two game designers and a few employees who carried out orders — at least for the first time there was enough space.
But Apogee was growing at a staggering rate. Soon the company acquired an automatic number, 1-800-Apogee1, and ten employees who served users and executed orders.
During the first years of the company's existence, the work of the office was more like a factory - because most of the actual development of the games took place somewhere else in the entire country, and in Garland the games came via modem and through BBS, which led to Miller's initial success.
Meanwhile, as the office grew, Miller realized that despite the fact that the game development allowed him to live quite well, he could earn some money in the field of publishing other people's games. Of course, he still didn’t have the traditional way of publishing games on carriers, but he had the Internet, a model of apogee and the determination of a sales agent who was ready to knock on every door.
For the search for talent, an ambitious publisher took advantage of what he had at hand: a stack of old gaming magazines. Among the authors of editorial articles and reviews, Miller unearthed several talented developers who were supposed to create games for Apogee. Among them was Todd Replogl, who would later give Apogee a whole million-dollar franchise, which everyone still remembers — Duke Nukem .
Ahead, Miller was waiting for a real blue bird - a programmer named John Romero.
Continuing - tomorrow. Tomorrow came - here it is .
Nerdy full time
In his youth, Scott Miller was lazy.In high school in the early 1980s, he, a retired teenager, escaped from the hot Texas sun, hiding in the campus of a computer lab, spending all his time programming long text adventure quests. Here he met George Broussard - another teenager, who at that time stood out only for his love of wearing shorts all the time. As often happened at that time, the guys were united among themselves by a friendly admiration for the local Apple II computer.
After graduation, Miller and Broussard both went to work at the local slot machine hall, which was called the Twilight Zone. Since the work turned out to be dusty, Miller could not only find time to attend college, but also got the freedom to improve in the latest video games. Every day Miller and Broussard competed against each other for machine guns, trying to beat each other's records in the tables of the best players.
')
Miller was expelled from second-year University of Dallas and allowed video games to grow through his life as if a weed grows in a garden. He practiced games all week, and on weekends he participated in local gaming tournaments, earning a modest additional income and gradually gaining a reputation among a small but friendly community of gaming enthusiasts. The rest of the time he was programming.
After Miller finished high school, his parents left to live back in Australia, where his father worked. And Scott, having stayed in Texas and having lost the comfort of his childhood home that had become empty, lived a life-dream of a young nerd.
First gaming magazines
Scott Miller wanted to earn more. Not without the help of Broussard, he wrote a guide on how to win in popular video games - as it turned out later, just to find out that the market is already overflowing with similar game guides, among which his work is simply lost. Nevertheless, the publication of the book brought another unexpected result - Miller was entrusted with keeping a weekly column in the Dallas Morning News newspaper. For the next four years, a young video game lover will be writing reviews for a popular local newspaper, sometimes making part-time work on individual niche gaming magazines. His earnings continued to remain modest - the money was just enough to make it to the next payment.
At night, Miller continued to program.
And so, in 1987, after several years of work, the ego finally woke up in professional criticism: he finally realized that he was able to make games that would be no worse than those he wrote about every week. So began the career path of Miller as a game developer and self-publisher.
“I remember how Scott worked from his parents' home,” his colleague Terry Nagy later recalled. “He was seriously proud that he could get a 16.5K modem that allowed him to communicate with game designers from around the world.”
Free swimming
At first, Miller hoped that he could sell his games in a more traditional way: sign a contract with a publisher who could record games on carriers, distribute them and promote them in retail.
Most publishers ignored Miller’s suggestion; those who did respond flatly refused to enter into a contract with an amateur designer. After all, he was just an ordinary guy with no higher education or experience in the gaming industry, and was known as a critic, not as a programmer. Even at the dawn of game design, in the 1980s, there was already a line between those who made the games and those who wrote about them.
But what was even worse - Miller did ASCII games that used letters, numbers and symbols instead of graphics - and this did not interest investors who were looking for a “new big hit”. Publishers wanted a large and experienced team of designers who worked on something intriguing — something that immediately captured the attention of those who regularly flipped through stacks of PC gaming magazines.
Miller was going to publish his own games on the media on his own, but he knew that the cost of printing products would cost him a lot of money and would be overwhelming - moreover, he lacked contacts even at the lowest level, in stores and other retail chains.
But Miller had another plan, from which his colleagues tried to dissuade him to the last. The developer could allow anyone to download his games for free through electronic bulletin boards (BBS) and voluntarily donate.
At that time, it was this software distribution method that served as the definition of the shareware model - then it was that everyone could copy and distribute the game for free.
Miller made his bet on the shareware model and waited for the results.
He released two text quests, Beyond the Titanic and Supernova . The games were warmly received by the BBS community, but donate proved to be financially inconsistent. (According to Miller, the total income from both games could not reach $ 10,000)
When finances came to an end, Miller left writing and got a full-time tech support for a computer consulting company. At night and on weekends, he continued to program and make new useful contacts. At BBS, Miller met with a community of designers like him who dreamed of becoming professionals. As he managed to find out, none of those who adhered to the shareware model, could not earn any substantial money.
"Absolutely everyone believed that the release of games online can not bring money," as Miller will say many years later.
Model
Miller's next game was a technological leap over his past text adventures: it was the Kingdom of Kroz , an ASCII adventure game from 60 levels. Proud of his brainchild, Miller could not bring himself to freely distribute Kroz . This time he chose a different strategy: his own.Miller broke Kroz into three "collections" of levels, which he called episodes. The first episode could be downloaded via BBS for free. When the player finished passing this piece, a splash screen with a return Miller mail address appeared. If a player wanted to complete the Kroz quest, then he had no choice but to send him a check to the creator.
The two remaining episodes, Caverns of Kroz and Dungeons of Kroz, could be purchased separately or all together (with a small discount). Buying episodes was also considered a product registration, so the player was able to contact the technical support of the game and get access to special cheat codes.
Miller began to receive an average of $ 1,000 per week in checks.
So overnight the amateur designer became a professional publisher; and since each publishing company is supposed to have a name, Scott also had to choose - but he did not have to think long. Let Miller today call his idea just “marketing magic”, but at that time he preferred to call it “the model of the apogee”.
Apogee
The highest point, the climax.
Model apogee
Distribution model in which the first part of the game is available for free - in order to push the players to purchase the remaining parts. (Used today everywhere - from the App Store to Ouya).
Mail was the worst possible way of accepting orders, but the newly-baked entrepreneur then could not afford anything else because he did not have a phone number for the company.
In June 1990, Miller released the new Kroz trilogy - and now he has started earning about $ 2,000 a week. After making sure that the written checks are stably stored on his desk, Miller left his former low-paying job in technical support and engaged exclusively in the development of games.
“I would not say that some special enlightenment came to me then,” Miller says, “I just knew that the online release of games would not work ... It seemed to me that the release of the advertising version was a reasonable step. My expectations were not really too high. ”
Next episode
Today, Miller says that Broussard has always been on his heels. According to him, Broussard did not take seriously the development of the game until he saw how much money Miller earns. Without thinking twice, Broussard founded his company Micro F / X, whose motto was “Micro F / X Software, a leading shareware game developer!”.
At the same time, Miller did not have enough time to be a game developer and a publisher at the same time - even though he devoted all his days to these activities all the time. So a year later, he invited Broussard to join Apogee Software Ltd. as a partner and co-owner, making him a Micro F / X trustee.
Miller at that time completed his first home and moved into it, along with his parents, who then returned from Australia. Early Apogee looked exactly like this: two adult men discussed the great future of their company, the entire industry and the world, and when they were not at home, Miller's mother answered calls from players instead of technical support.
In 1991, Miller and Broussard rented an office on Broadway Blvd. in Garland in Texas. Their first office was small, but there was enough space for two game designers and a few employees who carried out orders — at least for the first time there was enough space.
But Apogee was growing at a staggering rate. Soon the company acquired an automatic number, 1-800-Apogee1, and ten employees who served users and executed orders.
During the first years of the company's existence, the work of the office was more like a factory - because most of the actual development of the games took place somewhere else in the entire country, and in Garland the games came via modem and through BBS, which led to Miller's initial success.
Meanwhile, as the office grew, Miller realized that despite the fact that the game development allowed him to live quite well, he could earn some money in the field of publishing other people's games. Of course, he still didn’t have the traditional way of publishing games on carriers, but he had the Internet, a model of apogee and the determination of a sales agent who was ready to knock on every door.
For the search for talent, an ambitious publisher took advantage of what he had at hand: a stack of old gaming magazines. Among the authors of editorial articles and reviews, Miller unearthed several talented developers who were supposed to create games for Apogee. Among them was Todd Replogl, who would later give Apogee a whole million-dollar franchise, which everyone still remembers — Duke Nukem .
Ahead, Miller was waiting for a real blue bird - a programmer named John Romero.
Following the covenants of Apogee ...
In the continuation - about John Romer, John Carmack, Commander Keen , Wolfstein and 3D Realms.Continuing - tomorrow. Tomorrow came - here it is .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/198232/
All Articles