Technological Musings

I ran across an article on Gamasutra a few months ago, and I've had it in my list of things to write about since then. I decided to finally get to writing about it today.

Scott Miller is the founder of Apogee Software. Apogee, and it's sister-company, 3D Realms, are makers of some of the greatest games I've played. I grew up with these guys!

If we travel back a few years, back to the BBS days, there was a rather well-known BBS called Software Creations. I fondly remember dialing in weekly to check on the latest Apogee releases. Of course, I also remember, less fondly, getting in a helluva lot of trouble for running up the phone bill too. But, in the end, I think it was worth it. Apogee made some of the best games of that time and being the first on the virtual block with their latest creation was stuff of legend.

But Apogee was more than just a game company. They helped spawn a PC gaming revolution. Before Apogee, game makers either sold their games commercially, or released them as shareware, hoping users who downloaded their games would send them a few bucks. Commercial games relied solely on marketing and flashy ads while shareware authors relied solely on faith.

Apogee can be credited with bringing shareware to the masses and kickstarting the PC gaming revolution. They broke their games into multiple parts and released the first part for free, radically changing the well-established shareware model. This served as a fully-functional demo, enough to get you hooked, and then sold the rest of the game as a commercial product. And so the episodic model was born. They were also responsible for helping kickstart one of the most well-known game development companies, id Software.

Apogee started in 1986 with ASCII-based games such as Beyond the Titanic and the Kroz series. From there they moved into 2D CGA/EGA games such as Crystal Caves, Bio Menace, and, Duke Nukem, which would go on to become one of their most popular properties. Shortly after Apogee started doing business as 3D Realms in 1996, they released Duke Nukem 3D, arguably their greatest hit.

In the 20+ year history of Apogee and 3D Realms, they have released in excess of 70+ games. Unfortunately, most of these releases were from before Apogee entered the 3D age and formed 3D Realms, but then, most publishers have slowed output considerably since then due to the big budget games they create. More recently, 3D Realms has been working with external development teams.

3D Realm announced in May that it will be closing its doors, though they have since made announcements regarding an overhaul of their online store, as well as the release of a Prey-based iPhone game. Both of these announcements came roughly 1 month after the announcement of their imminent closing. According to Scott Miller, however, only the internal development team was released and 3D Realms will continue to do business. Miller claims there are still several titles in development by external teams.

Even today, Apogee continues to move in new directions. Scott Miller helped form a new game company, the Radar Group, which aims to take new ideas and form them into marketable properties for games, television, and movies. The Radar Group aims to take gaming into a whole new direction.

The Apogee name has been licensed to a new group of developers who aim to revive the label. According to Scott Miller, the new Apogee group is working on a Duke Nukem Trilogy and an up-to-date version of Rise of the Triad. RotT was originally intended as a Wolfenstein 3D sequel until ID Software pulled the plug.

While most of the gaming world has moved on to bigger titles, and while Apogee's role seems to have diminished somewhat, it's good to remember where it all started. Apogee helped make PC gaming what it is today. And who knows, perhaps they have something else up their sleeve.

Fan videos tend to be low-budget and that usually shows through in the end product. Don't get me wrong, there are some incredible fan-made creations out there. Every once in a while, a fan-film comes along that just fills you with awe. This is one of those films.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an HD version available, so you'll have to deal with Vimeo scaling it for you, or just watch the smaller version. Thanks to John Simpson (he with the famous beard), I stand corrected. You can get an HD version of the video, and even a DVD, from their official site. Best part is, it's all free. Though, it doesn't hurt to donate if you'd like to see more from these guys.

There's also an article about the shooting of this film. Interestingly enough, this was shot in Central New Jersey, though you'd never tell from the visuals.

When I was going through grade school, we learned how to subtract by borrowing. We learned how to add by counting. It was ok to use your fingers to count when we started, and I still use them occasionally today.

Flash forward a few years and it seems like schools are teaching a whole new language. Is this the math I learned? Drawing counters? What makes this easier? Sure, I get that most people learn how to round to ten first before adding, and it definitely makes things easier and faster, but trying to teach that right from the get-go?

If I, someone who knows and excels in math, have trouble understanding these lessons, then how do the kids handle it? These seem to be such convoluted methods to get to the same answer! Take, for instance, this math paper from a Boing Boing employee's daughter. Sure, I understand what they're trying to do here, and it's a trick we all learn. But starting out with this? Why?

My own children bring home math papers that use the oddest methods for adding and subtracting. My son brought home a math paper about subtraction and had trouble completing it. I tried to explain borrowing to him and he looked at me like I had two heads. Apparently borrowing is no longer taught, instead they use regrouping. They draw pictures to get the answer rather than using mathematics.

Yeah, yeah. In the end, they do subtract, but why the need to draw pictures? Do we not have enough fingers? Can we not use them to figure out every subtraction problem? Regrouping is basically borrowing, but the concept seems so much more convoluted and difficult to explain.

To make matters worse, I tried to explain why he needed to borrow/regroup. "You see, the top number is smaller than the bottom number, so if you subtract them, you'll get a negative number." He floored me by asking what a negative number was. Seriously? I tried explaining the number line and while he understood, he explained that the teacher never taught such things.

I fear for our youth's future. These are simple concepts. What happens when they get to the difficult stuff? Will they start relying on calculators and computers to multiply and divide because it's "difficult" and they'd have to draw really big pictures?

What is our education system coming to?

As most of us know, making changes in a live environment is often something done with extreme care. In fact, best practices dictate that such changes should be made during a maintenance window wherever possible. Of course, there are often situations where changes are made outside of the aforementioned maintenance windows, though these are generally emergency situations in which services have failed or severe problems are being experienced.

Being human, though, there are also times when we make rash decisions, believing that our modifications are so insignificant that they can't possibly cause problems. It's times like this that the big red caution light should go off in our heads. Of course, we often ignore that light and move forward with our plan, certain that nothing will go wrong and that we'll come out the other side as a hero. We'll be the person who tweaked the service and made it run even smoother.

I was that person today. However, as I have a very good friend named Murphy, my insignificant change caused a wonderful chain reaction of events ending in a major service interruption. Go me.

In the end, we resolved the problem and life continues on. Thankfully I work with people who are willing to forgive the occasional mistake, provided it's a learning experience and doesn't happen again.

The point of all of this is to show that even the smallest changes, no matter how insignificant, can result in catastrophic failure. Every change should be evaluated, tested, and scheduled for deployment whenever possible. And when you make that inevitable mistake, learn from it. We're all human and will, at one time or another, view ourselves as invincible. We're not. We make mistakes, we screw things up.

So, learn from my mistake, go make your own, learn and move on. As they say, Live and Learn.

Well, in about 3,000,000,000 years or so, but still. It's all going to end. Everything. We need to do something, right away! ... Wait, what? We're not going to all die in a huge collision? Well, thanks for the info Felicia!

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