Shareware Heroes by Richard Moss

Author:Richard Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800181106
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2022-07-15T16:37:36+00:00

Computer Gaming World gave it a 1.5-page review treatment, with writer Chris Lombardi noting in awe how ‘in Wolfenstein 3D, the player is “there” like no game I’ve ever played.’ Compute! magazine deemed it the best arcade game of the year – ‘a showcase of nearly flawless design and challenging gameplay’ that managed to impress even more for its use of digitised sound than its remarkable graphical innovations. And Electronic Games remarked that the game not only offered a level of detail that ‘almost approaches a kind of virtual reality’ but also that it had shown that Apogee was ‘ready to confront the Big Boys. [And] perhaps more significantly, it has shown that shareware is not just for the hobbyist anymore.’

This sense that the paradigm had shifted was not unique to magazine writers. In a February 1994 article for PC Review, journalist Dean Evans quipped that Wolfenstein 3D had ‘done for shareware what Richard Branson has done for personal enterprise.’

Indeed, Wolfenstein 3D didn’t just push shareware into the mainstream; it set new standards for what could potentially be achieved – and earned – with the model. It drew huge, new interest to the shareware space, both in terms of consumers looking at and being aware of shareware software, and businesses turning to shareware as a marketing and distribution tool. It set a new bar for quality in shareware, and it made Apogee and id rich.

The game had sold 150,000 copies by mid-1994, on the path to an estimated lifetime tally of 200,000 (plus around that many again for the FormGen-published retail episode). This was roughly triple the sales of Apogee’s previous top-seller Duke Nukem, and it was steady money too – they averaged around $200,000 a month (so $100,000 each) in shareware takings for the game for a year and a half.

With a huge, new game came huge, new challenges in staying on top of the fan community that had built up around them. And one day Apogee fan and BBS aficionado Joe Siegler – who ran a small board of his own – spotted something strange on the Software Creations BBS. ‘I saw this thing that was calling itself version 1.3 of Wolfenstein 3D,’ he says, ‘and it was a “porn version” where they had naked women on the walls and things of that nature.’

That didn’t sound legitimate to Siegler, so he wrote a message to Scott Miller drawing attention to the file. A day or two later, Miller replied that he was right – it shouldn’t be there – and thanked him for pointing it out. Then not long after that – probably just weeks later – Miller got in touch again: ‘Hey, would you like to be a beta tester?’

Siegler was granted access to a private area of Software Creations where beta testers could get pre-release versions of upcoming Apogee games, which at the time meant the opportunity to test out Allen Blum’s vertically scrolling shooter Major Stryker and the educational game Math Rescue by Karen Crowther

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