Like a DOS shell kind of thing?
SM: Right, it was a launching deal, sort of pre-Windows. That guy was making tons of money. I can’t remember his name. There was also PC-Write; I can’t remember all of them. But there were lots of word processors and database programs that were made as shareware. These guys were making a lot of money, but no one was making money in games. I really don’t know why. I guess it’s just human nature that if you download a game, and you have the whole game in hand, what’s the incentive to pay money for it? And games are seen as trivial programs, whereas these other things like PC-Write were seen as major programs and people felt more obligated to send the guy money. So really what Apogee was doing back then was releasing demos of our games, and really we were the first company to do that too. No one else was ever releasing demos of their games back before we did it. Where did you get the idea for episodic gaming — the “Apogee Model”? SM: I just knew from talking to other shareware game autho
