Apogee's flagship product (pre-Duke3D)?

[MrFlibble]

I was wondering, what game do you think could be called Apogee's "flagship" product? I suppose it's pretty safe to say that Duke Nukem 3D certainly qualifies, but what of the time before it was made? Basically, if it was 1994 or 1995 (or earlier if you want), and you had to put a stamp on a new Apogee game that would say "From the makers/publishers of X", and X had to be one single title, what would it be?

[MrBlackCat]

I have no idea... as most of my interest lies in 3D First Person Shooters.
To me, the Flagship of Apogee was the shareware model itself allowed them to excel and to produce Duke Nukem 3D.

Rise of the Triad was a great game to me. People complain about graphics now days, but play any of these on monitors from the day. Sizes of 14 and 15 were common, and they were "better" back then. No liquid crystal monitor is as good as the old tube types... I see them every day, side by side. They can't spin those crystals in liquid as fast as the light emission discharge rate from phosphorus. The point being these old games aren't represented properly on modern monitors is all.

Anyway, I don't see Apogee as even having a flagship game, just generally high quality maybe.

If I was to pick the most memorable for myself, Blake Stone was very impressive for a "Wolf Era" game. Then Rise of the Triad was the first "serious", "DooM Era" game. As far as adventure-puzzle, Mystic Towers was probably under-rated... I don't know much about Mystic Towers. I played the shareware enough to actually buy it. I have it still boxed up around here somewhere. (Did Apogee even develop this one? I don't think so.)

(ok... so I don't really have an answer. )

MrBlackCat

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

To me, the Flagship of Apogee was the shareware model itself allowed them to excel and to produce Duke Nukem 3D.

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

Anyway, I don't see Apogee as even having a flagship game, just generally high quality maybe.

Heh, you're probably 100% correct I was thinking along the same lines, but just thought I'd ask for other people's opinions

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

Rise of the Triad was a great game to me. People complain about graphics now days, but play any of these on monitors from the day. Sizes of 14 and 15 were common, and they were "better" back then. No liquid crystal monitor is as good as the old tube types... I see them every day, side by side. They can't spin those crystals in liquid as fast as the light emission discharge rate from phosphorus. The point being these old games aren't represented properly on modern monitors is all.

Oww, I'm beginning to regret that I gave away that old 14 fish-bowl monitor... It was old enough (or maybe not powerful enough from the beginning, I've got no idea) to have rather noticeable flickering, so it had to be replaced anyway.

I only got myself acquainted with ROTT in late 2000s (didn't even have access to a PC back when it came out, and none of my friends and classmates, who would provide me with most of the info about computer gaming, had it or played it), and immediately fell in love with the game (shareware version). It's an incredibly awesome game, one of the true masterpieces, and I guess it's only the immense popularity of Doom which seems to have overshadowed everything else that is responsible for it ending up underrated.

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

If I was to pick the most memorable for myself, Blake Stone was very impressive for a "Wolf Era" game. Then Rise of the Triad was the first "serious", "DooM Era" game. As far as adventure-puzzle, Mystic Towers was probably under-rated... I don't know anything about Mystic Towers, but I did buy it actually. I have it still boxed up around here somewhere.

Blake Stone is also really good, with some quite innovative features, I often do wonder why there are so few mods for that game compared to the sheer numbers of Wolfenstein 3-D mods, even though Blake Stone has quite a few extra bells and whistles to play with (guess this has been somewhat made obsolete with the source code being available, but anyway).

Never really played Mystic Towers a lot but it seems fine.

[8IronBob]

Terminal Velocity wasn't too bad, either. I enjoy a fantasy flight sim whensoever I can.
Now in terms of what I REALLY think is the flagship, I should think it would be Duke 3D, but I look at the Duke Nukem franchise as a whole to get that answer.
If there's one thing I liked from Apogee outside of FPS games, it was their sidescrolling platformers... Apogee was one of few developers that could make sidescrolling games not feel like ports of consoles.

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by 8IronBob

If there's one thing I liked from Apogee outside of FPS games, it was their sidescrolling platformers... Apogee was one of few developers that could make sidescrolling games not feel like ports of consoles.

Right Even though I haven't been an avid player of side-scrolling platform games for quite a while (I don't count Prince of Persia because of its uniqueness), this genre was some sort of a "prototypical" game to me. And when I started checking out Apogee's titles there was an immediate realization that the "native" PC platformers in fact comprised quite a different tradition when compared to console ones.

[MrBlackCat]

That is a good point. I played Contra with my brother a lot. He had consoles back then and I didn't. A good example of this is Crystal Caves... a very large game and nothing like that on a console.
Consoles vs PC's especially back then were even more of an apples vs oranges...

This was the early 90's for me... I had a MidWest Micro Elite COLOR notebook. It is on the table behind me and still works. I was just playing Duke Nukem II on it yesterday and left it on. This is a Cyrix 386/SX with 8meg of ram. (DOS/Win3.11)
Anyway, it had a built in 2400 baud modem... I bought an external 14.4 later when the lines here allowed it. (they were still limited to 9600 in the early 90's here.)
Each day, I would take the printed out list of Shareware from Software Creations BBS and calculate what I could download with my time each day. I think I had an hour a day account, and it was long distance.
Every time I dialed in, I had a download plan... I quickly Q'd up my downloads and started watching. I did this several times a week. Then the playing was on... one thing was for sure, Apogee games were tops.
I remember playing Duke Nukem 2 quite a bit actually... then I remember when Duke Nukem 3(D) shareware came out... I didn't get it right at first, as I was so busy playing DooM and every other "3D Virtual Reality" game available at the time... a few days went by and I kept thinking of all the improvements of Duke Nukem II over Duke Nukem I. Still very much into Side-Scrollers, I finally decided to get this Duke Nukem 3. You can image the surprise I got when it wasn't a side scroller!
Here is another aspect of the time... it was with the creation of "3D Realms" brand that the reality set in that side scrollers were dying. Back then, I thought of "game types" as side scrollers or platformers, pinball type games, maze types (pacman to wizard of war), board games, and forward driving type games... maybe a few others. There was this game called Castle Master... wasn't very interesting to me at the time (1990, still have it boxed) but it was the only one of its type... kind of a 3D maze. Then Catacomb 3D hit... WOW! Then Wolfenstein! Ok, now a new category was defined in my gaming world. Then DooM came out... and a lot of other games started popping up in this category. But less games of the other types were being made.

The point? It wasn't until Duke Nukem 3D and "3D Realms" were created did I realize that most other game types/categories were going to die out. Before Duke 3D, I just thought ALL of these categories would just co-exist and grow technologically along side each other... which didn't happen, at least during the 90's and through maybe 2008 or so. (excluding the handheld market actually)

Today, with so many new gaming devices and platforms like Android and IOS, a lot of these other "categories" of games have made comebacks though. And I am glad to see it.

MrBlackCat

[ZuljinRaynor]

Wolfenstein 3-D, but more importantly Doom, showed that FPS was going to become the big genre.

The reason being, id Software made FPS games and they were always bigger and had newer technology.

[MrBlackCat]

Exactly... Catacomb Abyss was dead before its release due to Carmack already working on the Wolf (256 color) engine. Wolfenstein had insane impact back then, like you say, but DooM was an amazing leap over Wolf 3D.
They were "the car" metaphorically speaking... everyone else just has different shapes and colors of said cars... but they are still just "DooM-a-Likes" to me.

MrBlackCat

[ZuljinRaynor]

Spear of Destiny will be my favorite FPS forever.

Also, Rise of the Triad was an FPS with limited weapons. You get your bullet weapon (which you upgrade, there is no reason to use anything besides the MP40 once you get it) and you can have 1 missile weapon.

Now everyone complains about limited weapons.

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

The point? It wasn't until Duke Nukem 3D and "3D Realms" were created did I realize that most other game types/categories were going to die out. Before Duke 3D, I just thought ALL of these categories would just co-exist and grow technologically along side each other... which didn't happen, at least during the 90's and through maybe 2008 or so. (excluding the handheld market actually)

I also didn't even think back then that some genres would flourish while others would go in decline. In fact, I remember a very odd feeling that anything could be done within the world of computer games, I mean, any imaginable world, setting or story could become real as a computer game. This idea was more important to me back then than the innovations in graphics and engines. By contrast, I didn't even realize that Wolfenstein 3-D, for example, was limited by nineteen degree walls and fixed wall height compared to Doom; that technical sort of stuff kinda eluded me altogether

Speaking of technological advancements back then, I remember I had a strong aversion towards true 3D games, because most models of anything other than mechanical objects looked to crude, clumsy and far less detailed compared to sprite graphics. Also, for some reason, I developed a dislike for third-person games, without even properly playing one. I have no idea why, I guess I thought they were less "realistic" than games played from a first-person perspective (similarly, I used to believe that real-time strategies were more "realistic" than turn-based ones ).

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

Today, with so many new gaming devices and platforms like Android and IOS, a lot of these other "categories" of games have made comebacks though. And I am glad to see it.

Yup, it's a pretty nice trend that shows that good games in old genres still can be done. I hope that eventually the race for more technologically advanced, stunning and sophisticated graphics will stop, and different genres and technological approaches to game design will become artistic and stylistic devices for the developers to pick at their pleasure (this is already happening in the indie game department, as far as I'm concerned).

[Malvineous]

Nineteen degree walls? That's pretty flexible ;-)

I still remember all the fuss about the violence when Wolf3D first came out. It was so realistic parents were worried their little darlings would turn into mass murderers if they so much as got a glimpse of it. Which of course made it all the more interesting to find out what the fuss was about! Nowadays Wolf3D is almost the kind of game you would let a child play precisely because it's much less violent than most modern FPS games.

But in answer to the original question, I think just about every game Apogee released became its flagship for a while...until the next game came out. They were all very high quality.

I would love to see more of them open sourced so they could be ported to the Raspberry Pi, and let a new generation experience them!

[MrBlackCat]

Originally Posted by ZuljinRaynor

Spear of Destiny will be my favorite FPS forever.

Why is that Zuljin? I have played it for a few hours, and I like it a lot. I would say that the level design was more mature and less "gimmicky" than some of the levels of Wolf 3D. But what is your reason?

Originally Posted by MrFlibble

**snip** In fact, I remember a very odd feeling that anything could be done within the world of computer games, I mean, any imaginable world, setting or story could become real as a computer game.

I was an addict for Wolfenstein 3D... to the point where I mapped some of the levels on 24inx36in (61cmx91cm) graph paper by counting (blocks) in game. Took many hours per level. I did this to reveal areas where secrets might exist. When I got a level editor, this method was obsolete. I still have some of those maps.
Anyway, a friend of my brothers told me there was a new game coming out from the same company (as Wolfenstein 3D) which was WAY better. I LAUGHED! LOL! I was so confident that due to previously slow progression of technology, that they could not possibly have done better than Wolfenstein already. I downloaded the Shareware the day DooM came out and "got taught a lesson." My reaction at the time was "ok, if this can happen this fast, what next?" That was a substantial turning point for my thinking.

Originally Posted by MrFlibble

**snip** Also, for some reason, I developed a dislike for third-person games, without even properly playing one. I have no idea why, I guess I thought they were less "realistic" than games played from a first-person perspective

I did exactly the same. I thought the character on the screen was a distraction and refused to play 3rd person games for many years. My first 3rd person game was Time to Kill, which I put off buying for more than a year because of this. I just finally decided to try it because DNF wasn't coming out, and I was starving for Duke Nukem.
Actually 99% of the games on my wall shelves are FPS's from the 90's... the only exceptions being to maintain series like Heretic II.

My only reasoning at the time was "it was just a game through my eyes" and I felt more like it was "me" in the game and not a puppet I was controlling in the game. I used to get the lighting in the room just right to see mostly the screen and sit at the perfect distance to not have to move my eyes, so it was like me looking where I turned. In modern game room I have UV direct and Red indirect lighting. It works perfectly for this. Not too bright, but the room is visible which reduces eyestrain and motion sickness.
This was one I took with UV only. I don't have one with the Reds on. All the red is under the tables or behind things. This allows you to easily navigate the room without much brightness. I chose this due to gaming FPS's specifically when games got better lighting like in Quake. Remember the first time you walked into DooM E1M2, to the left (after the first key card) and you go through that dark area toward the flickering light area? Oh yeah... I don't think I will ever forget that. The room lighting effects the impact of these events greatly, so I do mine the best I can.

This should give an idea.


FPS's have always been what I enjoy... I love the GTA series because of the environments however, and play them as much as any FPS's I have. I buy all the FPS's I can find for all of my consoles... until a few years ago, I ONLY collected FPS's for all systems, with the exception of Arcade classic. Now I buy everything I can afford for all systems as they will not be here much longer... and never again will they be so inexpensive.

I am so glad I was a gamer through the 90's... I consider it the golden age of gaming. I so enjoyed seeing all this change. It is sad to see it go by so fast, but I have preserved more than I can play before I die.

MrBlackCat

[ZuljinRaynor]

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

Why is that Zuljin? I have played it for a few hours, and I like it a lot. I would say that the level design was more mature and less "gimmicky" than some of the levels of Wolf 3D. But what is your reason?

Lots of nostalgia, probably. I only had Wolfenstein 3D as Shareware, but a friend of my dad's from work gave us Spear of Destiny (I have the box on my shelf). It was probably the first full version game I had at that time.

But the reality is I cannot find any faults in Spear of Destiny. All the levels feel great. There is also only 21 of them instead of 60 like Wolfenstein 3D so they don't get repetitive and they feel higher quality. Also I really like how they designed the levels with what textures to put where.

The art style in Wolf3D/Spear is great, IMO, and that makes the game still look good to me. Yes, it has aged, but the art style is still nice and presents well.

I also do Wolfenstein modding (nothing released so far. Failing harddrives have gotten in my way twice so far) and I always started with Spear of Destiny as my base because I have such fond memories of the game.

Also killing Nazis never gets old.

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by Malvineous

Nineteen degree walls? That's pretty flexible ;-)

Haha, that blunder on my part turned out to be quite funny

Originally Posted by Malvineous

I still remember all the fuss about the violence when Wolf3D first came out. It was so realistic parents were worried their little darlings would turn into mass murderers if they so much as got a glimpse of it. Which of course made it all the more interesting to find out what the fuss was about! Nowadays Wolf3D is almost the kind of game you would let a child play precisely because it's much less violent than most modern FPS games.

I've read that rather recently (last summer IIRC), the sales ban on Doom and Doom II in Germany was finally removed for good. The board of "protecting the youth against harmful media" decided the graphics no longer could be considered to represent "realistic violence", and they also cited the protagonist giving a "good example" by saving humanity from monsters

They won't do the same with Wolfenstein 3-D though, 'cause it's all about something-that-had-never-happened, and also openly depicts the-guy-who-must-not-be-named

Originally Posted by Malvineous

But in answer to the original question, I think just about every game Apogee released became its flagship for a while...until the next game came out. They were all very high quality.

I remember how I first read about Terminal Velocity (this was once again quite some time after it came out; I just missed a lot of stuff back in the day 'cause I didn't have Internet access, a decent PC to work with, and later spent most of the time playing Starcraft ) and initially thought it wasn't too interesting (I used to think that any FPS other than the "on foot" shooters was kind of boring), but decided to check out the shareware version after all exactly because it was published by 3D Realms. The reasoning being that if it's from 3D Realms, it can't be bad. Needless to say, I wasn't disappointed at all

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

I was an addict for Wolfenstein 3D... to the point where I mapped some of the levels on 24inx36in (61cmx91cm) graph paper by counting (blocks) in game. Took many hours per level. I did this to reveal areas where secrets might exist. When I got a level editor, this method was obsolete. I still have some of those maps.

Heh, this idea had ocurred to me too, but I realized it would take too much time (and paper), so I didn't bother trying after all

Originally Posted by MrBlackCat

I did exactly the same. I thought the character on the screen was a distraction and refused to play 3rd person games for many years. My first 3rd person game was Time to Kill, which I put off buying for more than a year because of this. I just finally decided to try it because DNF wasn't coming out, and I was starving for Duke Nukem.
Actually 99% of the games on my wall shelves are FPS's from the 90's... the only exceptions being to maintain series like Heretic II.

Hmm, I still have the difficulty of accepting Heretic II as part of the series... At any rate, games from the Heretic/Hexen series changed a lot when they moved on from the Doom engine anyway, and I must say I'd have rather preferred more stuff by Raven made on that engine.

The game that had made me come to terms with the third-person view was actually Hitman. As for Time to Kill, I remember reading about it in a magazine back in the nineties, and despite my suspicious attitude towards third-person games, I had a favourable impression and even regretted that I didn't have a PS to play it I do remember that the article mentioned the option to switch to the first-person view for precision shooting, so I thought, why not? But I never played the game anyway.

[ZuljinRaynor]

I did the Wolf3D mapping on paper too. I took it to the next step and made actual game maps once I found the tools.

[MrBlackCat]

I did that also... all of my Wolf 3D mapping was making levels for my girlfriend to play with plenty of custom art tiles with thing like "I love you" signs on the walls and layouts of places she knew... like our house and yard etc.
Silly maybe, but it was fun at the time.

I found some of the copies... it seems like the originals were destroyed at some time in the past. Not sure what happened to them. They might still be at my old house. I just realized that these are actually more than 19 years old. (holy crap!) The crap part to THAT, is that I made them in my mid 20's!
(I had to turn the contrast on these up so high to show the fading images they look WAY worst than they are. The paper is actually only slightly yellow and the extreme brown on the edges doesn't exist to the naked eye. To give an idea of just how much the contrast is turned up, the flooring is actually bright green artificial turf.




MrBlackCat

[Malvineous]

Wow, I'm amazed how you all made paper maps! I only ever did that once - to find my way out of the maze in Hugo II.

Luckily for me I heard a rumour at school that there were cheat codes for Wolf3D not long after I got hold of the game, and somehow I managed to get hold of enough information to activate them (which meant I didn't get much homework done that afternoon!) Once I found out what Tab+O was I could finally hunt down all the secret areas in the levels!

[MrBlackCat]

Hey Malvineous...
You have to realize that this was VERY early after the games release, and I had no idea there was even such thing as a Level Editor... I never edited any games before this one. I only programed in Fortran and others BASIC languages at the time, so the concept of an editor was not even in my head really. To me, a game was made by coding it from a flowchart model.

I planned to map ALL the levels. LOL! But then when I found WolfEdit, all of that ended. I still have all versions of Wolf 3D and the editors and everything right in my Wolf directory. I kept all edits separate from the original installations.
I had a DOS menu system back then also, which I had batch files to rotate sets of save games in and out of each Wolf directory to a master save game directory. I still have some sets of saves from 1992.

The point I am trying to make is that Wolf was a HUGE deal for me personally... I remember looking through all the files for the programmers and learning about them. I contacted John Carmack and John Romero directly through email to learn whatever I could, as I was sure to be a 3D Game Programmer. John Romero did give me some suggestions. It was enough to help me realize I was not really well suited for 3D Programming. Then they got famous big-time and exchanges ended. This must have been when they were realizing DooM... they got seriously busy for the rest of their lives.

MrBlackCat

[ZuljinRaynor]

Wolf3D (specifically Spear of Destiny) is still, in my mind, the most important game I've played. I like modding it because it lets me realize my dream of working on a game in the 90s.

[KO Gilligan]

Rise of the Triad.

It's needed so badly, but who would actually create the damn thing? I must be getting cynical in my old age when I'm thinking Apogee's new flagship ROTT would probably be developed for Smart Phones

[MrFlibble]

I'm sure the trend with the new handheld systems/phone-whatnot hybrids is but a phase of a process that will ultimately result in a balanced approach to various game design styles. 2.5D games won't be viewed as "outdated", but instead will be considered a possible style to choose for a game. It's only logical because video game graphics can't possibly advance indefinitely (at least, without the risk of falling into the uncanny valley).

On that note, I'm very intrigued by the impact of what is possible to implement in a game from the purely technological standpoint versus gameplay mechanics intended by the designers, and how this interaction of possibilities and ideas results in actual gameplay. In this respect, Rise of the Triad is a very interesting if not unique example, as the Developers (of Incredible Power) made use of whatever they could with the already dated Wolfenstein 3-D engine to create a rather unusual, highly dynamic game that in fact beat Doom with its arguably more advanced engine in quite a number of aspects.

Also, I think it was ROTT that had pioneered several features that had become a de facto standard for the FPS genre, like (correct me if I'm wrong on some of those) thumbnail snapshots for saved games, or a separate set of levels specifically made for multiplayer games.

[KO Gilligan]

Now that you mention it, RoTT should be made available for mobile devices. It's a no-brainer.

... and yea, RoTT totally kicks Dooms ass.

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by KO Gilligan

Now that you mention it, RoTT should be made available for mobile devices. It's a no-brainer.

It is my understanding that DOS apps are easily ported to such devices because DOSBox builds are available on those platforms.

[twelvepaws]

I say KROZ. It's the first Apogee game that got my attention - way back in 1991! It was awarded Best Game of the Year and also introduced the shareware concept. From that point, the expansion of products exploded so that there was at least a new game every few months. I admit I'm relying on memory and haven't researched company history recently.

Before KROZ there were two or three S. Miller games that didn't get much attention, something about Beyond Titanic and Galaxy. They were clearly experimental while S. Miller's mind was progressing on to other products.

KROZ is still playable today, primitive format and all, with some technical assists. I never get tired of trying to get the maximum gems, whips, etc. How many other games from twenty-plus years ago can make that claim?

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by twelvepaws

I say KROZ. It's the first Apogee game that got my attention - way back in 1991! It was awarded Best Game of the Year and also introduced the shareware concept. From that point, the expansion of products exploded so that there was at least a new game every few months.

That's a very good point. Indeed, the Scott Miller model can be said to be the flagship product of Apogee, as it was already suggested somewhere above in this thread, I think.

The official history confirms your memories:

November 26, 1987 - Scott Miller submits the first Kroz episode to Softdisk. Over the next couple of years, Scott does a a total of 7 Kroz episodes, and this is the bulk of the early product for Apogee. Scott did release a few game "packs" during this time, which were re-packages of games he had written himself prior to 1987. Kroz is considered to be the "birth of Apogee", but the name was in use before this time. Scott did some games on his own as an independent prior to this time, and he did use the name "Apogee Software Productions" previous to 1987.

Originally Posted by twelvepaws

KROZ is still playable today, primitive format and all, with some technical assists. I never get tired of trying to get the maximum gems, whips, etc. How many other games from twenty-plus years ago can make that claim?

Rogue and NetHack?

[Mikko_P]

Uhh.... What is "flagship" product?

[MrFlibble]

That's a major, most successful product a company gets strongly associated with.

Duke Nukem 3D, for example, is the most popular and well-known game from Apogee/3D Realms, and it may be called a flagship product because most people will probably remember Duke3D whenever 3D Realms is mentioned, and only then Terminal Velocity or Shadow Warrior (even though SW for example uses a bit more advanced version of the Build engine).

A flagship product is the one which is usually put in phrases like "from the makers of..." to characterize a company.