In those earliest days, I did phone support, which could be a challenge at times (RIP Debbie Flowers). After a time, I realized I was there to replace “Employee 1”, so I go WAY back. 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 few chats, I decided to move from Philadelphia to Dallas to work for Apogee. Scott asked in the beta group if anyone wanted to come work for Apogee, and I jumped on it. This was Shawn Green, who left Apogee to go to id Software. ![]() During this time, the first ever employee hired by Apogee (other than Scott’s family) decided to leave Apogee. 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 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”. The PC version would distribute Apogee shareware, as it was very popular at the time. I used to have a BBS named “The Arsenal of Freedom” (first on Apple //, then on PC). I’ve told this story elsewhere before, but my first association with Apogee was as a BBS operator back in Philadelphia. Some Personal Stuff If you ordered a game from us in 1992 – it shipped from this desk. 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. ![]() This first one is in the same spot as full size original. ![]() 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. When I wrote it in 2020, I did have some problems with the size, but it worked on the front end (even if I didn’t have problems on the back end). NOTE: In Jan 2023, this blog post became a problem for my site. Also, all the contents of this page are © 2020 Joe Siegler except for game screenshots and trailers.) (The spinning logos are leftover images from our 1990’s website designs. This isn’t meant to be an official document for Apogee Software Ltd / 3D Realms. This is my personal thoughts and observations. 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.Ī 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! 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. 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. I’m writing about the history of the company.Īpogee 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’ve talked about that part of my life in more detail elsewhere on this blog. ![]() I worked there from Dec of 1992 through May of 2009. I’m not getting into the why of that, just pointing out what happened in the past. 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. While not perfect, Slipgate and 3D Realms are taking small steps every day to enable their developers to have the best opportunities to thrive in our digital age.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). Part of working remotely is adapting traditional workflows to online media as well as relying on and taking advantage of online-mediated communication software and similar tools to improve the quality of life of everyday work. Remote work has enabled Slipgate to employ a global team of talents where various people with different cultures can meet and work on things they love while not sacrificing time on transportation but also enabling people to have more free time for personal hobbies, family, etc. They believe that personal freedom, e.g., being able to work from wherever and whenever, is very important for creative ventures like game development, as you can't put a timer on creativity. At Slipgate and 3D Realms, though, remote work has always been part of the core. In today's digital age, especially in a post-Covid 19 world, the value and possibilities of remote work have been expanded.
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