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Kroz
''Kroz'' is a series of Roguelike video games created by Scott Miller for IBM PC compatibles. The first episode in the series, ''Kingdom of Kroz'', was released in 1987 as Apogee Software's first game. It was also published on ''Big Blue Disk'' #20. ''Kroz'' introduced the scheme of the first episode being free and charging money for additional episodes; a technique which defined the business model for Apogee and was adopted by other MS-DOS shareware publishers. The games were discontinued in 1999. In March 2009, the whole Kroz series was released as freeware by Apogee, and the source code was released as free software under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. Gameplay The object of the game is to survive numerous levels of attacking monsters and ultimately find the priceless Magical Amulet of Kroz. The player character collects gems as they go; each time a monster touches them, they lose a gem and the monster dies. The character's main defense consists of whips which can be used to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
3D Realms
3D Realms Entertainment ApS is a video game publisher based in Aalborg, Denmark. Scott Miller (entrepreneur), Scott Miller founded the company in his parents' home in Garland, Texas, in 1987 as Apogee Software Productions to release his game ''Kroz, Kingdom of Kroz''. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company popularized a distribution model where each game consists of three episodes, with the first given away free as shareware and the other two available for purchase. ''Duke Nukem'' was a major franchise created by Apogee to use this model, and Apogee published Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D the same way. Apogee adopted the trading name 3D Realms in 1996; the "Apogee Software" name and logo were sold to Terry Nagy in 2008, using which he established Apogee Entertainment. While Apogee focused on 2D platform games and puzzle games, 3D Realms produced fully 3D games and went away from shareware distribution. Following two extensively delayed games, ''Prey (2006 video gam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scott Miller (entrepreneur)
Scott Miller (born 1961 in Florida) is an American video game designer, programmer, and entrepreneur best known for founding Apogee Software, Ltd. (which later became 3D Realms) in 1987. Starting with the ''Kroz'' series for MS-DOS from that year, Miller pioneered the concept of giving away the first game in a trilogy—distributed freely as shareware—with the opportunity to purchase the remaining two episodes. This method became the standard distribution method for Apogee. Competitors such as Epic MegaGames later adopted the same business model. Biography Growing up, Miller lived with his father, Boyd Miller, an engineer at NASA who worked on the Apollo and Gemini programs. Miller began writing video games in 1975 on a Wang 2200 while living in Australia. He wrote several MS-DOS games that circulated widely on BBS file bases: ''Computer Quiz'', ''Astronomy Quiz'', ''BASIC Quiz'', '' Beyond the Titanic'', ''Supernova'', ''Kingdom of Kroz'', '' Word Whiz'', ''Trek Triv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shareware
Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. Shareware is often offered as a download from a website or on a compact disc included with a magazine. Shareware differs from freeware, which is fully-featured software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available; and free and open-source software, in which the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect and alter. There are many types of shareware and, while they may not require an initial up-front payment, many are intended to generate revenue in one way or another. Some limit use to personal non-commercial purposes only, with purchase of a license required for use in a business enterprise. The software itself may be time-limited, or it may remind the user that payment would be appreciated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apogee Games
An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion. General description There are two apsides in any elliptic orbit. The name for each apsis is created from the prefixes ''ap-'', ''apo-'' (), or ''peri-'' (), each referring to the farthest and closest point to the primary body the affixing necessary suffix that describes the primary body in the orbit. In this case, the suffix for Earth is ''-gee'', so the apsides' names are ''apogee'' and ''perigee''. For the Sun, its suffix is ''-helion'', so the names are ''aphelion'' and ''perihelion''. According to Newton's laws of motion, all periodic orbits are ellipses. The barycenter of the two bodies may lie well within the bigger body—e.g., the Earth–Moon barycenter is about 75% of the way from Earth's center to its surface. If, compared to the larger mass, the smaller mass is negligible (e.g., f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1987 Video Games
File:1987 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes after leaving the Port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, killing 193; Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashes after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, killing everyone except a little girl; The King's Cross fire kills 31 people after a fire under an escalator Flashover, flashes-over; The MV Doña Paz sinks after colliding with an oil tanker, drowning almost 4,400 passengers and crew; Typhoon Nina (1987), Typhoon Nina strikes the Philippines; LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 crashes outside of Warsaw, taking the lives of all aboard; The USS Stark is USS Stark incident, struck by Iraq, Iraqi Exocet missiles in the Persian Gulf; President of the United States, U.S. President Ronald Reagan gives a famous Tear down this wall!, speech, demanding that Soviet Union, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tears down the Berlin Wall., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 Zeebrugge disaster rect 200 0 400 200 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epic Games
Epic Games, Inc. is an American video game and software developer and publisher based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. Following its first commercial video game release, '' ZZT'' (1991), the company became Epic MegaGames, Inc. in early 1992 and brought on Mark Rein, who has been its vice president since. After moving the headquarters to Cary in 1999, the studio changed its name to Epic Games. Epic Games develops Unreal Engine, a commercially available game engine which also powers their internally developed video games, such as ''Fortnite'' and the ''Unreal'', '' Gears of War'' and ''Infinity Blade'' series. In 2014, Unreal Engine was named the "most successful videogame engine" by ''Guinness World Records''. Epic Games owns the game developers Chair Entertainment, Psyonix, Mediatonic and Harmonix, as well as cloud-based software developer Clou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bulletin Board Systems
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email. Many BBSes also offer online games in which users can compete with each other. BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance asynchronous modems drove the use of online services and BBSes t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gamasutra
''Game Developer'', known as ''Gamasutra'' until 2021, is a website founded in 1997 that focuses on aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine '' Game Developer''. Sections ''Game Developer'' has five main sections: #News: where daily news is posted #Features: where developers post-game postmortems and critical essays #Blogs: where users can post their thoughts and views on various topics #Jobs/Resume: where users can apply for open positions at various development studios #Contractors: where users can apply for contracted work. The articles can be filtered by either topic (All, Console/ PC, Social/Online, Smartphone/ Tablet, Independent, Serious) or category (Programming, Art, Audio, Design, Production, Biz(Business)/Marketing). There are three additional sections: a store where books on game design may be purchased, an RSS section where users may subscribe to RSS feeds of each s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polygon (website)
''Polygon'' is an American entertainment website that publishes blogs, reviews, guides, videos, and news primarily covering video games, as well as movies, comics, television and books. At its October 2012 launch as Vox Media's third property, ''Polygon'' sought to distinguish itself from competitors by focusing on the stories of the people behind the games instead of the games themselves. It also produced long-form magazine-style feature articles, invested in video content, and chose to let their review scores be updated as the game changed. The site was built over the course of ten months, and its 16-person founding staff included the editors-in-chief of the gaming sites ''Joystiq'', '' Kotaku'' and '' The Escapist''. Its design was built to HTML5 responsive standards with a pink color scheme, and its advertisements focused on direct sponsorship of specific kinds of content. Vox Media produced a documentary series on the founding of the site. History The gaming blog ''Poly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Softdisk
Softdisk was a software and Internet company based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Founded in 1981, its original products were disk magazines (which they termed "magazettes", for "magazine on diskette"). It was affiliated and partly owned by paper magazine ''Softalk'' at founding, but survived its demise. The company has been known by a variety of names, including ''Softdisk Magazette'', ''Softdisk Publishing'', ''Softdisk, Inc.'', ''Softdisk Internet Services'', ''Softdisk, L.L.C.'', and ''Magazines On Disk''. Softdisk is most well known for being the former workplace of several of the founders of id Software. Publications Publications included ''Softdisk'' for the Apple II; '' Loadstar'' for the Commodore 64; ''Big Blue Disk'', ''The Gamer’s Edge'', and ''PC Business Disk'' for the IBM PC; ''Diskworld'' (later ''Softdisk for Mac'') and ''DTPublisher'' (specializing in desktop publishing) for the Apple Macintosh; ''Softdisk G-S'' for the Apple IIGS; ''Softdisk for Windows'' for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disk Magazine
A disk magazine, colloquially known as a diskmag or diskzine, is a magazine that is distributed in electronic form to be read using computers. These had some popularity in the 1980s and 1990s as periodicals distributed on floppy disk, hence their name. The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s caused them to be superseded almost entirely by online publications, which are sometimes still called "diskmags" despite the lack of physical disks. Defining characteristics A unique and defining characteristic about a diskmag in contrast to a typical ASCII "zine" or "t-file" (or even "g-file") is that a diskmag usually comes housed as an executable program file that will only run on a specific hardware platform. A diskmag tends to have an aesthetically appealing and custom graphical user interface (or even interfaces), background music and other features that take advantage of the hardware platform the diskmag was coded for. Diskmags have been written for many platforms, ranging fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Code Page 437
Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacritics), Greek letters, icons, and line-drawing symbols. It is sometimes referred to as the "OEM font" or "high ASCII", or as "extended ASCII" (one of many mutually incompatible ASCII extensions). This character set remains the primary set in the core of any EGA and VGA-compatible graphics card. As such, text shown when a PC reboots, before fonts can be loaded and rendered, is typically rendered using this character set. Many file formats developed at the time of the IBM PC are based on code page 437 as well. Display adapters The original IBM PC contained this font as a 9×14 pixels-per-character font stored in the ROM of the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) and an 8×8 pixels-per-character font of the Color Graphics Adapter ( CGA) ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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