Apogee: Man Orchestra and Online Game Publisher 1987 (continued)

The story of Scott Miller and Apogee (3D Realms), start here .

Key idea

John Romero worked for Softdisk, which at the time was engaged in publishing a monthly magazine sold in regular stores. A diskette was included in the magazine, on which there was a lot of useful software - some of it was developed by the company's own programmers working in the editorial office. So, Romero was just one of them.

After several months spent by Miller for sending Romero emails written on behalf of several fictional fans of John, he finally managed to get an answer. The two began to talk about how a possible collaboration between a game designer and Apogee might look.
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“What a pity that I have not saved these letters ... Now they probably are worth a fortune!” Miller jokes today.

Miller wanted to sign a contract with John Romero and some of his colleagues - in particular, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack (namesakes) and Tom Hall - on the independent development of games that through Apogee would be published on the Internet. Since Miller did not have to worry about publishing games on media and their further distribution, he offered Romero and the company a huge (compared to other publishers) percentage of sales revenue.

Under the leadership of Carmack, the development team created the Super Mario Bros. game port . 3 on a PC - before them, this was considered absolutely impossible ( adaptive tile refresh ). Romero showed Miller the demo of the game, and the publisher was simply stunned. He realized that it was his ticket to a brighter future - let this ticket be protected by copyright law and a highly paid team of Nintendo lawyers.

Of course, Apogee could not publish Mario 3 on a PC. Miller came up with another plan - he signed a contract with the team to create a new game that would resemble Mario by gameplay and appearance. The team began work on a project that was titled Commander Keen .

“I gave them development money,” says Miller. “They had to work on the game in the evenings and on weekends, because they all continued to work on Softdisk. It took them all five or six months. We released the game, and it became incredibly successful. And after that, they almost immediately quit their job. ”

Before Commander Keen was released in December 1990, Apogee’s average monthly salary was approximately $ 7,000; after - $ 30,000. In February 1991, the development team retired from Softdisk and founded a new independent studio - id Software. Softdisk threatened them with a lawsuit, claiming that the id team had violated its contractual obligations, and the company had to make concessions to the former employer - they were required to develop several additional games for Softdisk as contractors.

Miller was interested in two games made for Softdisk under this contract - these were Hovertank 3D and Catacombs 3D . Both games were performed in the genre of a proto-first-person shooter. Miller asked id to make his next Commander Keen game in the same genre - a first-person shooter. The result is all seen: Wolfenstein 3D .

“When you release a game, you never know how it will be accepted,” Miller notes. Wolfenstein was the first massive 3D shooter - after all, Catacomb 3D sold no more circulation than the magazine Softdisk. Management in it was unusual for players of that time, and for some movement in three-dimensional space caused a headache. Suddenly people would hate this game?

Since the release of the first free episode, Wolfenstein has been bringing Apogee about $ 200k a month for a full year and a half. Doubts about the performance of the apogee model are not left with anyone.

Looking back into the past, Miller describes Wolfenstein as a game perfect for the apogee model: this game was incomparable to anything else. To feel it, you had to play it at least once, but when you touch the keyboard and go through the first level, you already wanted more.

And Apogee wanted the players to get this very “more” - but they had to do it without id.

What's in a name

After the release of Wolfenstein, Miller went on a trip to San Francisco to the annual Game Developers Conference exhibition in order to hire new developers and popularize the Apogee brand.

Miller remembers that at GDC he saw the report of the head of EA Richard Hillman, one of the authors of the Madden franchise. That was standing in the hall full of publishers and developers, and told them ... about the success of Wolfenstein !

As Hillman said, several young guys posted a teaser demo online and made millions of dollars on it. In his opinion, EA should have paid close attention to this - this model threatened to take over the world in the future.

Unfortunately for Miller, Apogee could not prevent others from using the model he invented. The company owned only the name of the model, and even then it quickly lost its meaning - people did not call this way of distributing games “apogee model”, they preferred to christen it with the good old term “shareware” - its definition changed and became consistent with Apogee strategy.

As a result, Miller did not have any rights to his best creation - because it was just a strategy, which in its meaning was no different from the defense strategy in football.

Then Miller understood it or not, but he was at a crossroads: he could continue to improve digital distribution, turning it into a controlled, patented and monetized conveyor; or continue to grow as a publisher of computer games, competing with other publishers and developers who may have started to distribute their games in the same way.

Miller chose the latter. For him, the model has never played a value. “The games for me have always been the main thing for me,” he remarks today.

“The shareware model is the most honest of the models, because it is an implementation of the principle of“ try before buy ”- you can try the game before you buy, and not rely on the marketing of the next slop game ... All these things will not work if you have a bad game” .

The non-viability of the model in the form in which it was first implemented, quickly manifested itself. Any developer or publisher could freely copy this approach - which they did.

Friendly rivalry

Let us digress for a while before moving on to the final, and recall one funny episode from the story of old Apogee.

Miller's first rival lived in the same city as him.

His old friend George Broussard became an independent game designer shortly after Miller, and the spirit of friendly rivalry was quickly established between them. Their first games were more like experiments, but at first they both were engaged in programming full-fledged text quests - two adult people who were constantly trying to overtake one another.

Miller argues that Broussard kept trying to give his activities a tone of secrecy - it even went so far that even the source code locked the key in a suitcase.

Miller and colleagues well remember those days that they spent trying to open this suitcase. In the late 1980s, young people often visited Broussard to see a movie — and they didn’t care too much whether the landlord was home or not. Broussard often left his suitcase in the living room on the couch, and one of his colleagues kept trying to open it while watching another movie.

Once the suitcase really opened. Miller - a super spy in a T-shirt and faded jeans - dragged his trophy from Broussard's house to himself. There were a few sheets of paper inside - it was Broussard’s game written in Turbo Pascal, and Miller decided to check his code. As he says today, he had to fix a few bugs just to start the game - and in comparison with it, Supernova, which Miller only planned to put out for free on the Internet, was a cut above.

But after many years, it will not be so important ...

3D Realms

The developers of id Software have chosen the way of self-publishing their next game - after all, the method that they were taught by Miller and the company, they have already learned. This game will later become DOOM - perhaps one of the most influential games in the history of the industry.

“As far as I know, they exactly repeated everything that they had learned from us. DOOM was moving in the same way that we were promoting our games ... From their side, this was the right step - because after Wolfenstein they had matured so much. At that time, they knew exactly what they wanted to do themselves, and they had the money to do everything on their own. At that time, they had no reason to work with anyone else. ”

Meanwhile, for boxed sales of Wolfenstein , Apogee made a deal with a more traditional publisher, FormGen. When the game appeared on the shelves of regular stores, Apogee was able to reach out to thousands - if not millions - of those buyers that she could not reach on the Internet.

This was a profitable business decision, even if in the long run it brought the company closer to traditional game publishers.

Worse, Apogee watched the quality of online games less and less. The aggressive marketing strategy of releases has allowed the birth of both real hits ( Death Rally ) and failures ( Hocus Pocus, Wacky Wheels ).

Due to the simplicity of the idea of ​​digital distribution, the same thing happened again and again - the developers were successful and they had no reason to stay under the wing of Apogee. Therefore, the publisher is constantly in search of another, the next great developer.

The company, whose path to success began with innovation, has become increasingly reactionary. Miller and Broussard decided to increase the budget for their own development and shift the company's focus to three-dimensional games - this was a natural reaction to the success of Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad .

Apogee has developed a 2D side-scroller called Duke Nukem , and this game was a success - it brought from $ 20,000 to $ 30,000 per month. Therefore, the company decided to develop a sequel - Duke Nukem 3D - but already under the sign of 3D Realms.

The company wanted to avoid public associations of its new games with the name Apogee, which managed to get a lot of negative reviews for the release of mediocre games. For a while, it worked. The 3D Realms brand brought a second wave of success, which began with the release of Duke Nukem 3D in 1996. Duke Nukem 3D sold 3.5 million copies, making Miller and Broussard incredibly rich.

In April 1997, Broussard announced the development of the continuation of the game - Duke Nukem Forever . Her exit was scheduled for Christmas 1998. In the end, it turned out that the development of the game took fourteen years.


The 3D Realms team made their bet on the games, preferring their development to distribution, and this step, unfortunately, eventually ruined it. Despite the serious successes of the games released in the late 1990s - early 2000s (like the one that brought Max Payne's several million hits), 3D Realms, nee Apogee, went bankrupt.

Back to basics

In 2009, Apogee initiated the process of declaring itself bankrupt and began the process of selling and leasing rights to its extensive catalog of games, which lasted for several years. The same year, Apogee / 3D Realms sold rights (along with responsibility for the sequel) to Gearbox Software's Duke Nukem , which completed the creation of Duke Nukem Forever and released it in 2011.

Shortly before the company declared itself bankrupt, a childhood friend and faithful colleague of Broussard and Miller, Terry Nagy, bought the rights to the name of Apogee, not forgetting to buy the rights to Rise of the Tryad and a few more titles. So Apogee, which exists today, is Apogee Software, LLC, which should not be confused with the original company - Apogee Software, Ltd.

Appreciate the irony - when the life of the past Apogee came to an end, modern digital distribution just began to straighten its shoulders, and the United States slowly began to entangle fiber ...

According to Nagy, today Scott Miller is involved in the company's affairs, but is deprived of the right to make any decisions. Miller owns a stake in the company, like his friend Broussard.

Today, Nagi makes a living by re-launching the Duke Nukem series on mobile devices and distributing other old company games through Steam and other sites. “With the possibilities of modern digital distribution - clouds, high download speeds and everything else ... people can now effortlessly instantly download really huge games,” he says. This summer, he released an updated version of Rise of the Triad on Steam and other sites.

“And the boxed versions don't interest me at all,” says Nagi.

Miller says that at Apogee is now “a much more intimate atmosphere,” and that he likes to be closer to the core of the industry — he likes to help new studios rise from scratch.

“I’m generally satisfied with how things are now,” says Scott Miller. He manages 3D Realms from the comfort of his home, and other employees also work remotely. However, Miller is now bored by the atmosphere of that old office and the opportunity to work alongside friends. “Then people have always been so passionate about what they wanted to do, all this gleam in their eyes ... And today we have to force them to work, the desire for them does not come by itself”

Today's 3D Realms is a zone of minimal risk. You have no gigantic staff, no expenses for an office, and the main activity is licensing and outsourcing several games.

“We are developing several completely new projects right now,” says Miller’s voice from a telephone receiver, sitting far, far away in his quiet home deep in the heart of Texas ...

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Dear reader!

Unfortunately, the original article ends here. In general, this is right - the story of Apogee is over, and the story of each of the games or people mentioned can easily be drawn to a separate article (or even a short story). But if you liked it and would like “something else in the same vein,” then I have one interesting offer for you.


I first became acquainted with the book Masters of Doom in 2011, and since then it has become one of my favorite books. It took the author David Kouchner six years to write it - he researched everything that was available, and conducted hundreds of interviews with everyone he could - of course, including two John's: Carmack and Romero. The result of labor was the most reliable description of the internal life of id Software and its creative geniuses; she managed to accommodate the period starting from the childhood of two John and ending with the announcement of Doom 3, highlighting in detail the creation of each of the games of the company. Importantly, the book succeeded in something that sometimes lacks modern textbooks on history - it captures the whole story from several points of view. 12 years have passed since the release of this wonderful book, but it is still still recommended to be read to friends - for example, the day before yesterday in the popular blog CodingHorror.com.