Scott & Chana Miller become parents

Scott Miller, President and Founder of Apogee Software, Ltd, along with his wife, Chana had a healthy baby boy this day.

Mom and baby are doing fine. The child's name is Jace Miller. We at Apogee all wish them well with their new bundle.

Posted by Joe Siegler at 12:01 PM

Scott Miller awarded "Lifetime Achievement Award"

Here is a copy of the press release announcing Scott's award.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Apogee's Founder Awarded "Lifetime Achievement Award" for Contributions to the Shareware Gaming Industry

Dallas, TX -- July 10, 1995 -- At the Fourth Annual Shareware Industry Awards, held June 23 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Apogee Software's founder and President, Scott Miller, was presented the "Lifetime Achievement Award."

Miller earned the award for pioneering shareware's now popular multi-episode marketing method, now used by most game companies that release a portion of their games as shareware, including Interplay, LucasArts, Capstone, Epic MegaGames and id Software.

Apogee is also known for many other firsts involving shareware game marketing: Apogee popularized the idea of releasing games that contained a dozen or more cheat codes which would be later found by enterprising players and extend the life of the game. Plus, Apogee first encouraged players to hack into our games' data and make their own levels, which could be widely passed around on online services and the Internet.

"I'm deeply honored to win this award, but being just 34 years old I hope this doesn't mean my career is downhill from here!" Miller, who is only the forth recipient of this award, started Apogee with the release of Kingdom of Kroz in 1987, and began a shareware revolution with that game's trilogy marketing method, now widely known as the "Apogee Model."

Apogee quickly rose to fame in 1991 after the release of the Commander Keen series and the even more popular Duke Nukem games. In 1992 Apogee released id Software's Wolfenstein 3D, which became a huge international hit, pulling in over 160,000 direct orders, totally bypassing the retail channel. Apogee has kept the hits coming with games like Blake Stone, Raptor, Rise of the Triad, and Terminal Velocity (released through Apogee's new 3D Realms label).

"Apogee will always remain a shareware publisher because it keeps us close to players," said Miller. "You can't release a bad game and have it succeed as shareware, and we're confident our future games will pass this test. Otherwise, we don't deserve to survive as a company. So far, we're not only surviving, we're prospering."

(Also at the shareware awards this last month, Apogee's Rise of the Triad won "Best Action Game", beating out Descent and Heretic, both solid competitors. In total, Apogee has won more Shareware Industry Awards (8) than any other company.)

Posted by Joe Siegler at 12:01 PM

Apogee World Wide Web Goes Online!

From Joe Siegler:

There's no actual news story for this item. When the 1995 & 1996 archives were discovered in May of 2005, we noted that the launch of the website didn't have any big announcement, just a date mark that the event happened.

I had thought these ancient news items were lost forever, but thanks to the magic of archive.org, I was able to fully restore our news history, going all the way back to the start of our website on July 7, 1995.

This text you're reading was written on May 23, 2005 - I find it hard to believe that our website has been going for a decade now. You can tell the scope of our news stories is different in 2005 than it was in 1995. Look at some of the announcements from back then and how little they actually said. We didn't even announce the release of v1.0 shareware of Duke Nukem 3D (Jan 29, 1996).

Thanks for visiting our site - and our news archives! There's nothing earlier to find - July 7, 1995 was our first appearance on the web!

Posted by Joe Siegler at 12:00 AM