Preserving the History

[MrFlibble]

BTW, here's a nice site dedicated to Bitmap Brothers' legacy:
The Chaos Regime

[MrFlibble]

Two sites dedicated to Sierra games:
Sierra Chest
The Sierra Help Pages

[Edit] And this is the official website of Ken and Roberta Williams, no less:
http://www.sierragamers.com/

[MrFlibble]

BTW, the development history of Inner Worlds really makes for an interesting read. I think it's one of the early examples of Internet-based international software projects, the development of which wasn't unlike modern-day open source projects at SourceForge and similar places.

[MrFlibble]

A rather lengthy interview with Scott Miller at Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4 ... scott_.php

Here's the part about the shareware model:

A Deeper Look at Shareware History

How did you first learn about the shareware model?

SM: Just through being deeply involved in the BBS scene.

The term was around for a while before you were making your shareware games.

SM: Yeah, I think shareware came into being around 1982 or '83. I think that's when that word was coined, and I think Jim Button is the guy who coined it. Before I came along, there was a group called The Association of Shareware Professionals. All the top shareware authors were part of this, and there were a lot of people making a lot of money in shareware, but they were only making money in areas of PC productivity. There was something called "Automenu" at the time.

Like a DOS shell kind of thing?

SM: Right, it was a launching deal, sort of pre-Windows. That guy was making tons of money. I can't remember his name. There was also PC-Write; I can't remember all of them. But there were lots of word processors and database programs that were made as shareware.

These guys were making a lot of money, but no one was making money in games. I really don't know why. I guess it's just human nature that if you download a game, and you have the whole game in hand, what's the incentive to pay money for it? And games are seen as trivial programs, whereas these other things like PC-Write were seen as major programs and people felt more obligated to send the guy money.

So really what Apogee was doing back then was releasing demos of our games, and really we were the first company to do that too. No one else was ever releasing demos of their games back before we did it.

Where did you get the idea for episodic gaming -- the "Apogee Model"?

SM: I just knew from talking to other shareware game authors who were making no money and saying, "Don't get in this if you want to make money," that the fault in their plan was they were releasing the whole game. So basically, I decided to release a demo and have that demo have an advertisement screen -- or multiple screens -- that told people, "Hey, this isn't the whole game. If you like this, there's more you can buy."

You'd see that screen when you loaded up the game, you'd see it when you exited the game, and you'd especially see it when you'd finish the game. It'd say, "Hey! Your adventure doesn't end here. Order these next two episodes and continue your adventure. Call this 800-number." That method was like striking gold. It was the right combination.

It was almost like a marketing Trojan Horse. After you got the demo in their hands, you had a marketing vehicle right there for the rest of the product.

SM: Right. Now what was interesting was that the Association of Shareware Professionals -- a group that I tried to join after doing this -- rejected me as a member because they said I violated the "Customer Code," as they put it. And that code was, "If you release something shareware, you have to give them the whole thing." You can't "cripple" it -- that's the word they used. They said that my games were "crippled" because I didn't give away the whole game. And so for years, I was not allowed to be a member of this association because...

They must have really enjoyed not making any money at all.

SM: [laughs] Eventually they caved in and they rewrote their rules to where they allowed me to be a member, and they allowed any member to distribute games like I was doing in that "crippled" way because, clearly, that was the way you made money. And now, everyone in that association does that technique.

It's definitely the way to go. Was there one game's success that made them change their mind and let you in?

SM: Yeah, it was a couple games. It was finally after the release of Wolfenstein that they basically saw the light and they were pretty stubborn about not wanting to change their rules, because they felt like they had made such a huge argument... You know, there were actually hundreds of emails within their forum on CompuServe.

I would have these huge long arguments with them in that forum saying, "Hey look, guys. This is the way of the future, this is clearly a proven technique." I said, "And the proof's in the pudding: no one's upset with this. No customers are saying, 'Why the hell am I not getting the full game here?' They understand the principle behind sampling a game and then paying for the rest of it. There's no uproar over this, so why are you guys not allowing it?"

So they finally caved in.

Some people have credited Michael Denio's game Captain Comic as a pioneer shareware game. Do you have any comments on that?

SM: That's one of the guys I talked to who said, "Scott, you're not going to make any money making shareware games." And then, after I basically proved him wrong and was making lots of money, that's one of the guys I tried to recruit: "Hey look, you're obviously a great game maker. Just do it right -- work through Apogee, and we'll make lots of money." But he had a pretty secure job somewhere else -- I forget where now -- and just didn't want to fool with it.

Well, he did eventually release Captain Comic in a semi-episodic format like your Apogee games: he used his first game to promote a non-shareware sequel, so he learned something from you, I guess.

SM: Hm. I wasn't aware of that. At that time, he had already released the full game, so that probably hurt him quite a bit.

What was Apogee's highest selling shareware game of all time?

SM: Duke Nukem 3D is our highest. That game sold a total of about three and a half million copies. The first Max Payne sold four million copies, but it didn't have a shareware version.

What were some of your best-selling titles back in the classic arcade Apogee days?

SM: Probably the three that stand out are Commander Keen, the original Duke Nukem, and Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein was pure shareware -- we never had a retail version of it. It sold -- I want to say it sold 200,000 copies, in that area. That was by far our best seller then. I think the original Duke Nukem sold around 60 or 70,000 copies. And the original Commander Keen sold around 50 to 60,000 copies.

Also, Rise of the Triad sold probably about 110,000 copies. And Raptor was up there -- around 80 or 90,000 copies.

[MrFlibble]

I've just noticed that the article The Making of... Dune II that was published in the Edge Online magazine is gone, but luckily, web.archive.org has got a copy:
http://web.archive.org/web/200812122057 ... page=0%2C0

[Edit] More on the topic of historical articles, here's a classic one, dedicated to Rise of the Triad:
http://archive.kontek.net/rott.classicg ... index.html

[MrFlibble]

An extensive article about the Realms of Arkania series of RPG games:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/arkania/arkania.htm

[ThreeHeadedMonkey]

Thanks for sharing the goods! Some interesting reading materials here.

[MrFlibble]

Just found an interview with Lee Jackson (who did the music in Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D) at GameSpot:
http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/inter ... son_a.shtm

[MrFlibble]

Ancient DOS Games

Ancient DOS Games is a webshow dedicated to bringing to light many of the games made 10, 15, 20 or more years ago for personal computers using the Disk Operating System, aka DOS. Each episode generally covers a single game, shows a variety of gameplay footage, discusses how you might go about obtaining the game nowadays and how to run the game best using the DOSBox emulator on a modern computer.

Each video page also has additional information and corrections to cover any mistakes that creep into the videos or elements that get missed entirely. Information may also include links of interest or additional notes.

Thanks to Dogbreath from dosgames.com for finding this site!

[MrFlibble]

Nice to see some companies offer downloads of their old games' manuals in PDF format:
http://3drealms.com/tech/manuals/ - Apogee/3D Realms games
http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/ - Blizzard games

[Calvero]

http://www.3drealms.com/tech/hintsheets/

[MrFlibble]

Those, too

[MrFlibble]

I've just noticed an interesting post at the 3D Realms forums:

The Wolfenstein 3D Hintbook and Spear of Destiny Hintbooks have been released for freeware. You can see them at http://www.wolfensteingoodies.com/wolfe ... s/docs.htm . John Romero gave Math Stath permission to upload them. They include a lot of storyline information not in the game. The Spear of Destiny Hintbooks are a must read for the storyline of the game. The SOD hintbooks file include the lost episodes hintbooks. I like all of the Hintbooks. The Grosse brothers in Episode 6 Level 10 are Fans Grosse, Pans Grosse, and Mans Grosse. They are not Hans Grosse. The Wolfenstein 3D Hintbook says this. The hintbooks include a lot of behind the scenes stuff. The Spear of Destiny Hintbooks are basically a read this since there is no read this in Spear of Destiny. What do you people think of these hintbooks? I actually have physical copies of all the hintbooks. I was wondering if these Hintbooks could be posted on 3d Realms? I think it would be a good idea if 3D Realms posted them or at least linked to them on the Wolfenstein 3D page. They are huge files.

[MrFlibble]

Hmm, I didn't realize the development of Age of Wonders dates back to 1996. Just found an archived page about the game at Epic MegaGames' website:
http://web.archive.org/web/199610180403 ... om/age.htm

The game did resemble the Warlords series games somewhat at that point.

[leilei]

Jazz 2 dates to 1995 as well and originally was slated for Dec 96.... and the screenshots look just like the final!

Unreal development and hype kind of screwed Epic's Win95 debut. All they could get out in that time is Fire Fight. Also, the game D.O.G. also must have caused a backburner issue for Jazz 2 (as D.O.G.'s another Arjan game, same Jazz2 drawing routines even).

I don't know the details, but surely Sweeney knows. heh