#pc shareware

Where in Hell is Carmen Santiago?

Broderbund’s Carmen Sandiego educational series was immensely popular in the late 80s and early 90s, enough to eventually earn it a PBS gameshow and an animated television show. Each of the games featured the locale where eponymous criminal and her gang would travel, first starting with the entire world, narrowing it down to the United States and Europe, then broadening it through time and even into outer space. A common joke (or utterance of frustration) for gamers was, “where in hell is Carmen Sandiego?” or “Where would Carmen Sandiego show up next, hell?”. One developer, St. John M. Morrison ™ decided to take that literally for their own parody game, Where in Hell is Carmen Santiago?, where the world/time traveling thief (or rather, a similar but legally distinct facsimile named Carmen Santiago) ends up dying and being sent into the underworld, with you having to track her down. The game was not a retail product, but was instead distributed as shareware, typically through computer shows and other community efforts. 

Word Rescue

Edutainment games have never been the most successful of genres. After all, people play games to avoid learning, not to get more of it. Still, there are a few games that mix both gameplay and learning pretty well. Pretty much anybody with a grade school education in the 80s will remember Oregon Trail. While Word Rescue doesn’t have quite the widespread memories as either of those games, it’s still a pretty fun game, edutainment or not. 

Dark Ages

It should be said before anything else: Dark Ages isn’t really a very good game. However, it IS a huge leap in technology for Apogee, in both the visual and sound departments, and for that, it’s worth taking a look at. It’s also the game that solidified the structure for most of Apogee’s platformers, although there would be a lot of improvement and tweaking as time went on. 

Kroz

Long before Apogee became the shareware giant it was known as in its later years, it was just a simple one-man operation, run by Scott Miller. He wrote a few games before, but the Kroz series were the first games to use the Apogee name, even if they hadn’t started using their shareware model yet. Scott was inspired by Zork (the inspiration was made fairly clear by the title) and Rouge. He disliked how random Rogue was, so he created his own game, using pre-made level layouts and using a more arcade-like style of gameplay 

Pharaoh’s Tomb Arctic Adventure

Another game by Micro/FX and George Broussard (who somehow managed to spell his last name wrong on the title screen), this game is a much more ambitious piece of work than his earlier games. No longer pumping out yet another quiz game, this would be a full arcade adventure, complete with actual graphics, as simple as they may be. While it looks primitive, if not downright ugly in comparison to Apogee’s later work, it was this that would give the company the jumpstart to release better things down the line.