My Story of 3D Realms / Apogee Part I – A Cup of Joe
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My Story of 3D Realms / Apogee Part I
byJoe Siegler<br>Posted on November 2, 2020April 10, 2026
20 minute read
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.<br>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...