A companion piece for “The First Third” – COMPUTE!’s Gazette August, 2026
In 1987, a Dallas programmer named Scott Miller worked out a distribution trick that would reshape the software business. Give away the first chapter. Charge for the rest. Let the bulletin boards do the marketing.
The company he built on that idea, Apogee Software, spent the next decade turning the “episode one free” model into an industry standard. Along the way it published a small Texas outfit’s side-scroller called Commander Keen, bankrolled the same team’s Wolfenstein 3D, launched a leather-jacketed action hero named Duke, and gave a generation of DOS users their first taste of a game that didn’t come shrink-wrapped.
By 1994 the company had spun up its 3D Realms brand for the polygon era. By 1996 the Apogee name was retired from new releases entirely. But the catalog it left behind — platformers, shooters, puzzlers, a couple of genuinely strange educational titles — remains one of the most downloaded bodies of work in DOS gaming.
Below is the complete Apogee catalog as preserved by the DOS Games Archive: 38 titles spanning 1986 to 1996, plus one 2009 freeware re-release. Every link goes to the archive’s download page for that title, where you’ll find the files, screenshots, and DOSBox compatibility notes.
Before You Download: Shareware Is Not Freeware
Worth getting straight, because the distinction still matters in 2026.
Shareware meant “try the first episode free, then send us a check for the rest.” The free episode was legally redistributable — that was the whole point — but the game itself never entered the public domain. Most of these titles are still owned by someone, and a good number are actively sold today on GOG, Steam, and Zoom Platform.
Freeware means the rights holder later released it at no cost with no strings. Only a handful of Apogee titles fall here.
“Full version” in the archive’s labeling usually means a title that was liberated by its rights holder somewhere along the way, or one whose shareware release contained the complete game.
If a title below has a purchase link, buy it. The GOG and Steam releases are cheap, pre-configured, and put money in the pockets of the people who made them — several of whom are still working. The archive downloads are for preservation, curiosity, and the games nobody sells anymore.
The Early Years: 1986–1989
Text adventures and ASCII dungeon crawls, written largely by Miller himself before Apogee had a staff.
| Title | Year | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Beyond the Titanic | 1986 | Full version |
| Supernova | 1986 | Full version |
| Adventure Fun-Pak | 1987 | Freeware |
| Puzzle Fun-Pak | 1987 | Freeware |
| Kingdom of Kroz II | 1987 | Full version |
| Kroz (freeware release) | 2009 | Freeware |
Kroz is the origin story. Miller split it into three parts, gave away the first, and watched the registrations come in. The 2009 bundle collects the series with Apogee’s blessing.
The Breakthrough: 1990–1991
The years Apogee stopped being a one-man operation. Commander Keen arrives from a Louisiana software house that would shortly rename itself id Software.
| Title | Year | Developer | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons | 1990 | id Software | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Trivia Whiz | 1990 | Micro F/X | Full version |
| Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy! | 1991 | id Software | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Duke Nukem | 1991 | Apogee | Shareware — buy on Zoom |
| Crystal Caves | 1991 | Apogee | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Arctic Adventure | 1991 | Apogee | Full version |
| Pharaoh’s Tomb | 1991 | Micro F/X | Full version |
| Monuments of Mars | 1991 | Scenario Software | Full version |
| Dark Ages | 1991 | Scenario Software | Full version |
| Paganitzu | 1991 | Trilobyte | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Jumpman Lives! | 1991 | Dave Sharpless | Full version + source code |
Jumpman Lives! is worth a look for anyone who came up on the Commodore 64 original — Sharpless’s DOS revival ships with source, which makes it a rare open window into how these things were actually built.
Peak Apogee: 1992–1993
The catalog’s densest stretch, and the point where the shareware model went fully mainstream.
| Title | Year | Developer | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wolfenstein 3D | 1992 | id Software | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure | 1992 | Apogee | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Secret Agent | 1992 | Apogee | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Math Rescue | 1992 | Redwood Games | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Word Rescue | 1992 | Redwood Games | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Duke Nukem II | 1993 | Apogee | Shareware — buy on Zoom |
| Bio Menace | 1993 | Apogee | Full version — buy on GOG |
| Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold | 1993 | JAM Productions | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Major Stryker | 1993 | Apogee | Full version |
| Monster Bash | 1993 | Apogee | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Alien Carnage | 1993 | Interactive Binary Illusions / SubZero | Full version |
Alien Carnage — better known to most people as Halloween Harry — is the sleeper of this group. Australian-made, gorgeous 256-color art, and a flamethrower with genuinely satisfying physics.
The Long Goodbye: 1994–1996
Apogee’s last years under its own name, as the industry pivoted hard toward 3D.
| Title | Year | Developer | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rise of the Triad | 1994 | Apogee (pub. FormGen) | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Raptor: Call of the Shadows | 1994 | Cygnus Software | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Hocus Pocus | 1994 | Moonlite Software | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Wacky Wheels | 1994 | Beavis-Soft | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Mystic Towers | 1994 | Animation FX | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Boppin’ | 1994 | Accursed Toys | Shareware |
| Realms of Chaos | 1995 | Apogee | Shareware — buy on GOG |
| Death Rally | 1996 | Remedy Entertainment | Shareware — buy on Steam |
| Stargunner | 1996 | Apogee | Full version — buy on GOG |
| Xenophage: Alien BloodSport | 1996 | Argo Games | Full version |
Death Rally is the historically loaded one here. It was Remedy Entertainment’s first commercial release — the same studio that would later produce Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control. Apogee published it.
Running These on Modern Hardware
Nearly all of these are DOSBox-friendly, and the archive links out to the DOSBox compatibility database entry for each title. For anything using a Sound Blaster, set the emulated card explicitly rather than relying on autodetect — several of these ship with setup utilities that guess badly on modern host machines.
Roughly a dozen are also playable directly in the browser via the archive’s own player, which is the fastest way to decide whether a title is worth a proper install.
A Note on Preservation
The Apogee catalog survives because the shareware model made copying legal and encouraged. Files spread across BBSes, cover disks, and mail-order floppy vendors, and enough copies existed in enough places that almost nothing was lost.
That is a genuinely unusual outcome. Plenty of commercially published DOS software from the same years is simply gone — single-source, never widely duplicated, and now unrecoverable. Miller’s distribution trick turned out to be an accidental preservation strategy, and thirty-eight years later we are still the beneficiaries.
Titles and files courtesy of the DOS Games Archive. Where a purchase link exists, please consider supporting the rights holders — most of these games are still sold for less than the price of a sandwich.