My Story of 3D Realms

ADMIN NOTE (Jan 2026): The current owners of 3D Realms have taken down the “legacy” 3DR site (https://legacy.3drealms.com). I link to a LOT of things there in this article which are now broken links. I have to find some time to go through all of this article and link over to those things on the Wayback Machine. Just letting you know ahead of time I know about that issue. ADMIN NOTE (Jan 2023): In Jan 2023, this blog post became a problem for my site. It was 33,000+ words in a single entry. When I wrote it in 2020, I did have some problems with the size, but it worked on the front end (even if I did have problems on the back end). Now as my site has grown, it can’t process the thing in one giant piece on the front end, so I had to break it down into several smaller parts. This first one is in the same spot as full size original. No content has been changed, just broken up into smaller pieces to help with the blog being able to render the pages! There will be navigation links on the subsequent pages. Don’t miss the other pages beyond this first one. Those who know me (and have read my blog over the years) know that I spent quite some time working for Scott Miller & George Broussard of Apogee Software (later 3D Realms). Was probably the single most fun job I’ve ever had in my life, and to this day, I still wish the old team was together. I’m not getting into the why of that, just pointing out what happened in the past. I worked there from Dec of 1992 through May of 2009. I’ve talked about that part of my life in more detail elsewhere on this blog. That’s not why I’m writing today. I’m writing about the history of the company. Apogee was founded back in 1987, and still exists today, although the path to get from then till now has a lot of twisty, confusing bits. I always meant to lay this out, but the current incarnation of the company did a really cool “Realms Deep” thing last month, so I thought I’d get around to doing this historical piece.

Back in the day I was the company archivist, and moreso than anyone else there I seemed to care more about the legacy and history of the company. So that’s what I’ m doing today. Diving into the history of the company that I was a customer for, worked at for almost 17 years, and still maintain a relationship with today. A side note: I started writing this as Realms Deep was still going on (5 Sep), and I didn’t release this until early November, so it took far longer to put together than I thought it would – ha! One final comment before I get into it. This is my personal thoughts and observations. This isn’t meant to be an official document for Apogee Software Ltd / 3D Realms. This is me looking back on everything. With that out of the way…. (The spinning logos are leftover images from our 1990’s website designs. Also, all the contents of this article are © 2026 Joe Siegler except for game screenshots and trailers.) Some Personal Stuff If you ordered a game from us in 1992 – it shipped from this desk. I originally started work for Apogee on 14 Dec 1992. I’ve told this story elsewhere before, but my first association with Apogee was as a BBS operator back in Philadelphia. I used to have a BBS named “The Arsenal of Freedom” (first on Apple //, then on PC – both named after an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation). The PC version would distribute Apogee shareware, as it was very popular at the time. I was a customer, and bought many Apogee games from this era myself (Secret Agent, Commander Keen, the original Duke Nukem, etc…) Once Wolfenstein 3D came out (which I also bought), there was a version that came out that claimed to be a “new porn update for Wolf3D”. I alerted Scott Miller to that, and it was removed, and not long after that, Scott asked me if I wanted to be a beta tester for Apogee. I of course immediately said yes. During this time, the first ever employee hired by Apogee (other than Scott’s family) decided to leave Apogee.

This was Shawn Green, who left Apogee to go to id Software. Scott asked in the beta group if anyone wanted to come work for Apogee, and I jumped on it. After a few chats, I decided to move from Philadelphia to Dallas to work for Apogee. I was working for AT&T at the time, so jumping halfway across the country to work for a company with about 20 employees from a place with about 70,000 was a major culture shock. After a time, I realized I was there to replace “Employee 1”, so I go WAY back. In those earliest days, I did phone support, which could be a challenge at times (RIP Debbie Flowers). I was on phones to have me learn the products, and then I moved into online support. Something interesting, in looking for a document for another part of this article, I happened upon the original message that Scott Miller posted in the Apogee beta group asking if anyone wanted to come down to Garland and work for Apogee. I kept it, although it’s not in the greatest shape almost 30 years later. The message wasn’t dated, but it would have been early fall, as I was formally hired in October, had another trip to Texas in November, and moved permanently in early December. If you want to see the letter that got me to move 1,400 miles away to work for Apogee, I’ve taken a pic of it. You can click it for a larger version, which is easier to read. Anyway, once I got there, I noticed a few of the things in place then were in a disorganized state. That’s not to say the company was a mess, but certain areas that I had direct responsibility over were. I was always one for organization and record keeping – even back then. One of the first things I did was organize the online distribution files. I don’t know how many of you reading this were around back then, but in early 1993, the distribution method for video game shareware (something pioneered by Scott Miller) was a bit of an odd distribution. There were many hub BBS’s around – the home one for Apogee was then Software Creations.

They weren’t the only ones by far (others like Exec-PC come to mind), but all the shareware from before my time there from Apogee was a hodgepodge of various compression formats (both arj, pkzip, and arc), versions, and the like. Size of the downloads was definitely thing in this era of dial up modems. Make your file too large, and some people would check out. That happened in 1994 with Monster Bash – it was our first game to be over one megabyte for a download. We felt it was too large, and made a “lite” version of the shareware which was smaller. So space considerations were very real when a large part of your customer base existed on 300 & 1200bps modems in the mid 90’s. Anyway, I organized all of the products, collected the entire distribution line, repackaged them into a uniform format, and made sure things were kept up to date with the latest compressions to make the files as small as possible. Having the official product line all line up and look the same in terms of compression, naming, and whatnot was something I thought it should be. Thought it looked better that way. An example of a file_id.diz error – our earliest form of DRM. Back in those days, I did something which is commonplace now, but in 1993, it was unheard of. Scott & George decided they wanted someone to be what is now known as a “Community Manager”, but back then nobody did this. They pioneered online support, too. The person doing that online support was me. Things were different then, because there was no social media. We had things like CompuServe, GENie, Prodigy, Delphi, etc… If you were super techy (like John Carmack), you had .plan files – the precursor to twitter, in some ways. But it was my job to “be Apogee” online. It was a dream job. I also introduced the old concept of “file_id.diz” to the Apogee distribution files. I didn’t create the format, but I did introduce it to our company in a unified format. We did have it in one or two games before I started, but it wasn’t consistent.

The version I introduced had a similar format across all our games. It was also my idea to use file_id.diz as an early form of DRM on our registered games (to the consternation of some). My idea was this – if we had problems with people uploading the full/commercial versions of our games to BBS’s, I thought we could stick a file_id.diz in the full game directory, so if someone zipped it up and uploaded it, the BBS would then add the description that it was an illegal upload to the BBS listing and presumably be seen and removed. You couldn’t remove the file_id.diz file from commercial games, because the game would no longer run without that. Don’t know how many of you remember this about the Apogee games from back then, but this was totally my idea. What one of the commercial file_id.diz files would show if you uploaded it to a BBS. One of my other ideas then was to index the company’s output. Now back in 1993, we didn’t have a website yet (that started in the summer of 1995). However, everything that the company released from the moment I started working there I kept track of (with one or two exceptions that slipped through the cracks). Major releases, point releases, all updates, freeware, etc… I maintained that file until the day 3DR and I separated in 2009. I also kept track of it PAST my end of employment, and continued to updated it. It’s still maintained to this day (by me). That’s something I’m quite proud of. It has turned into a true historical document that I’ve been told people have used when researching our game history. The original is still available online, but what I’m doing with this blog post is expanding on the original basic list of games and dates. There will be additional info, like personal remembrances, screenshots, current availability, etc…. Me with the SW ’97 Gold Master CD package I was also the guy who uploaded all new shareware releases and patches. As is well known, our distribution network was housed at Software Creations, the major BBS run out of Massachusetts. However, they weren’t the only place.