3D Realms legal name Apogee Software, Ltd. is the name of a computer game publisher and developer based in Garland, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, established in . It is best known for popularizing the shareware distribution model and as the creator of franchises on the PC such as Duke Nukem, and also the publisher of other franchises such as Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D. The name 3D Realms was initially created as a branding label in July for use by Apogee which would be dedicated to just 3D games as Apogee was then known for several styles of games. However, shortly after this, 3D games started to dominate the industry, and Apogee decided to direct their focus on this style of game, and as such, the Apogee name was eventually abandoned as a public marketing name in late . While the company is now known as 3D Realms, the legal name of the company is still Apogee Software, Ltd.[Apogee started in with the release of Scott Millers Kingdom of Kroz, which used crude extended ASCII characters as graphics. Nevertheless, the game sold quite well and Apogee was born. In George Broussard joined the company as co-owner, bringing with him several games of his that were previously released under the name Micro F/X. Miller and Broussard run the company to this day.
Apogee started in with the release of Scott Millers Kingdom of Kroz, which used crude extended ASCII characters as graphics. Nevertheless, the game sold quite well and Apogee was born. In George Broussard joined the company as co-owner, bringing with him several games of his that were previously released under the name Micro F/X. Miller and Broussard run the company to this day.Apogee published games by other developers in addition to its own in-house titles. One of these developers, id Software, contributed to Apogees success with games such as Commander Keen and Wolfenstein D, but later severed their ties with Apogee with their release of Doom in although in its earliest stages, Doom was still an Apogee title.
Unlike traditional larger publishers that sold games in retail outlets, Apogee like many independent developers sold their products using the shareware method, depending mostly on BBSs, such as Software Creations, for distribution of their software.Initial Apogee games Beyond the Titanic and Supernova were distributed as traditional shareware; that is, giving away the full game for free, and asking the customer to pay for it if he/she liked it. Upon registering, the customer would be able to receive support and help for the game. However, this marketing model did not prove to be profitable enough, so Apogee decided to implement a variation on the shareware model. Starting with Kingdom of Kroz, Apogee would provide the first installment of a game composed of several episodes usually three for free as shareware, and sell the remaining installments by mail order. Registering the first episode would also enable the customer to receive support for that game, as well as giving them cheat codes for it.
This method became known as the Apogee Model. Initially, each episode of a game was sold separately, with discounts for buying all the episodes together. Later games did not offer the option to buy a specific episode; the customer could play the shareware version first episode for free, and buy the full registered version all episodes if they liked the game. The former model has some similarities with the episodic model currently used by some game companies.Apogees commercial success led to the widespread adoption of the shareware model and most of the time, the specific Apogee Model by other major publishers such as Capstone, Parallax Software, id Software, Activision, and Epic Megagames, and also led to a growth of Software Creations BBS, which would become the largest BBS in North America. Apogee later moved to the traditional retail model through distributors like GT Interactive; however, it still offers its earlier titles via shareware.
Apogee to D Realms
With the original intent to create a division for every genre of game Apogee produced, the two brand names D Realms formed in July and the now disused Pinball Wizards were created. Instead of publishing every game under Apogee as it had been in the past, the goal of this strategy was to create a different brand for each type of game genre, making each new game identifiable based on which brand it belonged to. This would enable Apogee to target different markets.However, many of those varied genres such as platform or scrolling shooter that were much of Apogees early releases were slowly dying out in the late s, which made this strategy unnecessary. In addition, due to the increasingly lengthy development time in producing a game title, video game publishers were no longer releasing titles at the rapid rate at which they once were.
D Realms was created in for the -D title Terminal Velocity and is responsible for the latest installments of the successful Duke Nukem games and for producing the Max Payne series earlier D games like Rise of the Triad were released under the Apogee name. The Pinball Wizards name was created for the pinball title Balls of Steel but has not been used since.The last game to be published under the Apogee name was Stargunner in . Since , all the companys games have been using a D engine even if the gameplay is D, like in Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. As a result, D Realms has replaced Apogee as the brand name to publish games under. Also, by the end of the s, Apogee felt their brand name was more associated with old, outdated games and adopted the D Realms brand for all future releases.[citation needed] When the D Realms name was first conceived, the official motto was Reality is our Game. That motto is no longer used and there is no official motto.
Current state and products
The most recent success the company was associated with was Prey, a game released July , after being stuck in development hell for years.The other major project that D Realms has been working on is Duke Nukem Forever, the upcoming sequel to Duke Nukem D. It was announced in and as of is still in development. The official release date of Forever is when its done.[] During this period, some outside developers have developed and published Duke Nukem spinoffs.D Realms has mentioned that a sequel of Duke Nukem Forever and a sequel of Prey are intended to be released in a near future. []In the seventh generation of video games, D Realms has stated that it will not support the Wii. In a blog post, Scott Miller stated that he believed the system would be a distant third behind the PlayStation and Xbox , and that the system would be Nintendos last.
Before commercial Internet access became common, networks of BBSes provided regional and international e-mail and message bases. Some even provided gateways by which members could send/receive e-mail to/from the Internet. Elaborate schemes allowed users to download binary files, search gopherspace, and interact with distant programs, all using plain text e-mail. Most BBS networks were not linked in real-time. Instead, each would dial up the next in line, and/or a regional hub, at preset intervals to exchange files and messages.The largest BBS network was FidoNet, which is still active today, though much smaller than it was in the s. Many other BBS networks followed the example of Fidonet, using the same standards and the same software. They were called Fidonet Technology Networks FTNs. They were usually smaller and targeted at selected audiences. Some networks used QWK doors and other non Fido software and standards.
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line or Telnet and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users.During their heyday from the late s to the mid s, many BBSes were run as a hobby free of charge by the SysOp system operator, while other BBSes charged their users a subscription fee for access, or were operated by a business as a means of supporting their customers. Still others were run by Internet service providers as part of their service to subscribers.
The term BBS currently may also be used to refer to any online forum or message board.
Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web and other aspects of the Internet. BBSes were a highly social phenomenon and were used for meeting people and having discussions in message boards as well as for publishing articles, downloading software, playing games and many more things using a single application.The BBS was also a local phenomenon, as one had to dial into a BBS with a phone line and would have to pay additional long distance charges for a BBS out of the local area, as opposed to less expensive local charges. Thus, many users of a given BBS usually lived in the same area, and activities such as BBS Meets or Get Togethers GTs or GTGs, where everyone from the board would gather and meet face to face, were common. As the use of the Internet became more widespread, BBSes slowly faded in popularity.
History
A notable precursor to the public bulletin board system was Community Memory, started in in Berkeley, California, using hardwired terminals located in neighborhoods.
The first public bulletin board system was developed by Ward Christensen. According to an early interview, while he was snowed in during the Great Blizzard of in Chicago, Christensen began preliminary work on the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS.BBS went online on February , in Chicago, Illinois. []With the original and baud modems of the late s, BBSes were particularly slow, but speed improved with the introduction of bit/s modems in the early s, and this led to a substantial increase in popularity. This was also the time when Apple-based BBSes were surpassed by DOS ones.Most of the information was presented using ordinary text or ANSI art, though some offered graphics, particularly after the rise in popularity of the GIF image format. Such use of graphics taxed available channel capacity, which in turn propelled demand for faster modems. Towards the early s, the BBS industry became so popular that it spawned two monthly magazines, Boardwatch and BBS Magazine, which devoted extensive coverage of the software and technology innovations and people behind them, and listings to US and worldwide BBSes. In addition, a major monthly magazine, Computer Shopper, carried a list of BBSes along with a brief abstract of each of their offerings.
With the rise of the World Wide Web around , BBSes rapidly declined in popularity in the Western world, and were replaced by systems using the Internet for connectivity, rather than direct phone lines.Some remaining BBS systems connected directly to the Internet, removing the necessity of direct dial-up and consequently attracting a more geographically diverse user base. This also allowed email to pass between them, so that for instance a user on a FidoNet system could send and receive messages in the days when Internet access was limited. As the internet grew in popularity explosively during the early s BBSes began to provide access to more internet services like SMTP email, Usenet and ftpmail. Many peoples first taste of internet access came via an account on such a BBS.Public BBSes were often prone to abuse. It was not uncommon for BBSes especially ones that did not use call back validation to be flooded with abusive posts and other attacks.
Software and hardware
The first BBSes ran on simple software, often written or debugged by the SysOp. By the mid-s, there were a number of free and shareware BBS programs, such as Fido, which offered various levels of features, ease of configuration, or capabilities. There were several successful commercial BBS programs, such as Wildcat, owned by Mustang software, which were often but not always more feature-laden or dependable than the free programs. For SysOps using the Commodore , a popular commercial BBS package was Blue Board, sold from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Most Commodore BBSes also included the option to use PETSCII commodore ASCII which included various graphical symbols instead of letters to create artwork on the screen. One popular nationwide service which used that feature over or baud modems was Quantum Link.
Unlike modern websites that are typically hosted by third-party companies in commercial server installations, BBS computers especially for smaller boards typically operated from the SysOps home, often in a bedroom or closet. As such, access could be unreliable, and in many cases only one user could be on the system at a time. Those few BBSs with multiple phone lines and either multitasking software or a LAN connecting multiple computers, could have multiple simultaneous users.By the late s, the majority of BBSs ran on DOS, due to the overwhelming popularity of DOS-based IBM-compatible computers, but remained text-based, rather than using the Graphical User Interface GUI design that became familiar on the World Wide Web in the early s. A BBS GUI called Remote Imaging Protocol was promoted by Telegrafix in the mid s but it never became widespread. There were several GUI-based BBSs on the Apple Macintosh platform, including Telefinder and FirstClass, but these remained widely used only in the Mac market.A more popular form of online graphics was ANSI art which operated similar to Commodore CASCII: replacing letters with blocks, changing colors on demand, or even including sound. During the late s and early s, several BBSes used ANSI to make elaborate welcome screens, and to make the overall experience more pleasant for the user.