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Era 3 · PC, shareware and strategy games

1987–2021renamed 3D Realms (1996); after litigation with Take-Two, the…

Apogee Software

A company from a bedroom in Texas that in 1987 came up with the idea of giving away the first third of a game for free and charging for the rest by mail, and on that simple trick built a publisher that in 1990 funded Commander Keen with a $2,000 advance and thereby helped bring id Software (Doom, Wolfenstein 3D) into being. The company later renamed itself 3D Realms, got stuck in the 12-year development of Duke Nukem Forever, and fought Take-Two in court, and in 2021 the founder bought the Apogee brand back.

Founders Scott Miller · George Broussard (partner from 1991)
Domains apogee1.com
gamingsharewarepublishingsolo-founder-turned-publisher

In brief

Scott Miller, a Texas programmer and columnist, founded Apogee Software in his parents' house in 1987 and came up with a trick that would later be called "the Apogee model": give away the first third of a game for free over BBSes and charge for the rest by mail. The trick did not work right away (only on the second attempt, after a couple of years of trial), but once it did, Miller became less a developer than a publisher: with a small $2,000 advance he funded three programmers from Softdisk who would make Commander Keen and then leave to found id Software, the creators of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Apogee renamed itself 3D Realms, spent 12 years stuck in the development of Duke Nukem Forever, fought Take-Two and Gearbox in court, and changed owners several times; in 2021 Miller bought the Apogee name back.

How it started (the founders)

Scott Miller had been writing games since 1975, as a teenager, on a Wang 2200 in Australia, where his father's work took him, a NASA engineer who took part in the Apollo and Gemini programs. By the mid-1980s he was more of an author than an entrepreneur: he wrote a weekly games column for the Dallas Morning News (1982–1985) and a book on arcade strategies, and on the side he worked at a junior college and in data-processing jobs.

His first attempts to make money from his own games already carried the name "Apogee": he distributed text adventures on a pay-if-you-like basis, and the results were disappointing. The turning point came not with the invention of a model but with a single game: Kingdom of Kroz, a roguelike inspired by Rogue, its name Zork spelled backward, written in Turbo Pascal 3.0 in CGA text mode. The game won silver in the CodeQuest contest of Big Blue Disk, a disk magazine from the publisher Softdisk, and came out through Softdisk with two sequels, while the copyright stayed with Miller. Only after Softdisk released the third game of the trilogy did Miller finally apply the idea he had been nursing: the first episode free, the second and third $7.50 each by mail. It worked immediately and noticeably: checks for $100–500 a day, $80,000–100,000 in total for the first year, even though the same texts and games under the same name had previously brought in almost nothing.

Year-by-year timeline

Lesser-known but significant facts

  1. Miller's first attempt to make money from games under the Apogee name failed. Before Kroz he gave away text adventures on a voluntary-payment basis, and it brought in almost no money.
  2. Apogee was the first shareware game company with its own home BBS: by 1995 Software Creations kept 100+ phone lines for 3,500 distribution points and was part of a network of, at its peak, 5,000+ independent BBSes.
  3. The "Wolfenstein" trademark was bought by the id team itself, not by Apogee: for $5,000 from a private owner in Michigan in April 1992, after the original rights holder, Muse Software, had ceased to exist; Miller only learned that the rights question was settled and immediately approved the project with a $100,000 advance, so the whole franchise rests on someone else's cheap legal find that Apogee simply funded quickly.
  4. Miller personally turned away a future competitor. Tim Sweeney sent him ZZT for publication, Miller declined it as too similar to Kroz, and Sweeney copied the model himself and founded Epic MegaGames; Miller later admitted that this had been very smart of him.
  5. Doom left Apogee not because of a conflict but because of growth. id's business manager Jay Wilbur insisted on self-publishing after concluding that Apogee physically could not handle the volume of buyers.

Legend vs. the record

The first growth lever

The lever was not the game itself but the switch from a failing honest shareware model to an episodic hook. Before Kroz, Miller had already tried giving his games away on the honor system under the Apogee name, and got only a handful of readers willing to pay. When in September 1989 he first applied the new scheme to Kroz (the entire first episode free on BBSes, the second and third $7.50 each by mail), the difference was not a matter of percentages but of orders of magnitude: from almost zero takings to checks for $100–500 every day and $80,000–100,000 for the first year. The free episode spread itself over BBSes at no marketing cost (anyone who had copied the file from a friend could play), and money was asked only of those who had already invested time and wanted more. The same technique was then scaled up to other people's projects: a $2,000 advance on Commander Keen in 1990 turned into $30,000 in the first two weeks of sales and $60,000 a month by June 1991, against Apogee's turnover of about $7,000 a month before Keen, and $100,000 on Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 raised the bar another twentyfold, to $200,000 a month against $10,000 for Keen. The growth lever was the shift from making games and giving them away for free to funding other people's games through the same funnel and taking a share: the shift from developer to publisher.

The paired story

Apogee and id Software are linked, quite literally, by a single money transaction: without Miller's $2,000 advance and his weekly $100 pizza checks in 1990, Romero, both Carmacks, and Hall would not have had the starting capital to leave Softdisk. Commander Keen was published and funded by Apogee entirely on Miller's model, and it was the first royalty check of $10,500 in January 1991 that persuaded the team to formally found id Software on February 1, 1991. From there the pair diverge while staying tied by the same model: id still made Wolfenstein 3D (1992) for Apogee, but on far better terms (the advance grew to $100,000, royalties to 50%), and with Doom (1993) id took distribution fully into its own hands, because Apogee physically could not handle the volume of buyers. The contrast: Apogee invented the funnel of a free piece leading to a paid continuation and remained an intermediary publisher on it for its entire career, while id pushed the same funnel to its limit and walked away from the intermediary as soon as the model began bringing in more money than the publisher's infrastructure could process.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

What a builder can take from this in 2026

  1. Give away exactly enough to hook people, and no more. The difference between Miller's failure (honest honor-system shareware) and the success of Kroz lay not in generosity but in the boundary: the free piece must be self-sufficient entertainment, not a promotional placeholder.
  2. Don't build everything yourself; become the funnel and the capital for other people's teams. Apogee's real growth came not from Miller's new games but from $2,000 on Commander Keen and $100,000 on Wolfenstein 3D put into other people's hands, against someone else's prototype, for a share of sales.
  3. When a partner solves a legal problem on its own, pay instantly. id itself found and bought the forgotten "Wolfenstein" trademark for $5,000; Miller did not come up with this find but immediately gave a $100,000 advance once he saw that the road was clear, so the franchise rests on someone else's cheap legal find and a publisher's quick decision.
  4. When your channel becomes a bottleneck, your best clients will go self-publishing. Doom left Apogee not out of a quarrel but out of plain throughput arithmetic, as soon as sales volume exceeded the capacity of the publisher's BBS infrastructure.
  5. A working combination of an advance plus a share of the funnel is not a one-off stroke of luck but a reproducible formula. By mid-1993, 7 of the 10 best-selling shareware games belonged to Apogee, not because Miller wrote them all himself but because the formula was repeated with new teams.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

Sources (primary first)

Secondary (context, cross-checking):

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