Some Ancient Apogee Games Released as Freeware

Apogee Software has been around for 17 years now - the first title was released back in 1987 when Apogee was nothing more than Scott Miller by himself in his bedroom. The games released back then were quite different, and over the years, we've released quite a few titles (well over 50 at last count - here's a complete list). Anyway, today we're here to bring you a freeware release of some of the earliest titles from our past. The two we're releasing are "The Adventure Fun-Pak" and "The Puzzle Fun-Pak". Each of these packs consist of four titles on their own. Here's a rundown on what's in them:

Adventure Fun-Pak:

*Rogue Runner
*Night Bomber
*Raiders of the Forbidden Mine
*The Thing

Puzzle Fun-Pak:

*Block Five
*Asteroid Rescue
*Phrase Master
*Maze Machine

Most of these are old text based games, and some of them won't run terribly well on today's faster computers. We do offer two "slow down" programs on our downloads page (Moslo & CPU Kill) - you might need to make use of one of these in order to play them. The slowdown programs are not ours, we're just offering them as a convenience - we can't help in getting them working for you. We're also told that the DOSBox emulation program has slowdown routines, too. Furthermore, we offer no assistance of any kind with these freeware releases - we do not support them anymore. Please don't ask for help with them, you won't get any.

Keep in mind these games are being released as freeware. They are NOT public domain. The difference is that while we will allow you to download these for free, we still retain copyright on the titles, and you can't turn around and sell them; you can't do whatever you want with them, basically. You can grab the zip file with the two packs here. Enjoy these really early examples of our company's legacy for free! We do have two previously released early titles available as freeware - old text adventures Supernova & Beyond the Titanic - you can get them from the downloads page as well.

If you'd like to learn more about the early days of the company, we strongly urge you to read the "Apogee FAQ", which is available on the FAQ page of our website. It has answers and information for just about anything you could possibly want to know about us.

Posted by Joe Siegler at 5:00 PM

Dipping into the Past

Today we have a few entries for you about things and projects from the past. First up is something that was brought to our attention by John Romero. This is a remix of some of the music from Episode IV of Commander Keen (Secret of the Oracle). The remix is entitled "Man Sieht Sich Galaxie", which translated to English roughly means "See you around the galaxy" (or so says a web translator). The remix was done by someone who goes under the name of analoq.

If you were a fan of the old Commander Keen series, and if you like music remixes, then you should definitely check this out. You can download the mp3 here, and you can visit the website where this and many other game music remixes are hosted at http://www.ocremix.org.

Posted by Joe Siegler at 5:00 PM