Top all-time · #7981
3D Realms
Company blog · 3drealms.com/newsgames
3D Realms is the company blog at 3drealms.com, writing about games. Since 2008, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link 3D Realms pages on Commander Keen and Apogee history, including the Keen history series, the downloads page, and a news post. They cite them for facts such as Keen's technical origins, its licensing, and early BBS distribution.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Redefining AAA - Action, Attitude, Adrenaline, 3D Realms has rocked the world for almost 30 years by publishing unforgettable iconic games.
What Hacker News says?
Apparently they sold 2-6 until recently - people were buying 1991 software? http://www.3drealms.com/keenhistory/keenhistory4.html Keens 2, 3, 5, & the full version of 6 are commercial software, and it is not legal to download them from anywhere.
Comment linking /keenhistory/keenhistory4.html
on “Commander Keen source code released”Submitted Game Design Tips from Tom Hall (1994) as a story · 75 points
HN discussionA little slice of history regarding one of the technical foundations of Commander Keen, for those that aren't aware: "Then, the first breakthrough. John Carmack devised a smooth, scrolling routine similar to that used for the background of Nintendo games but never before possible on the PC." [1] The technique is called, adaptive tile refresh. [2] [1] http://www.3drealms.com/keenhistory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w…
Comment linking /keenhistory
on “Commander Keen source code released”Submitted 3D Realms Dev Blog #2: The Art of Ion Maiden as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAfaik, there are (were?) some licensing issues why Keen stayed closed. There is a compatible Open Source clone, though: http://clonekeenplus.sourceforge.net/ (Disclaimer: I work on that project.) Btw., a very nice history of Keen (also referencing some of the licensing issues): http://www.3drealms.com/keenhistory/index.html
Comment linking /keenhistory/index.html
on “Id Software Open Source releases on GitHub”Submitted 3D in Build Engine and Ion Maiden – 3D Realms as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wish there were more books about the PC game industry at that time. I grew up with Apogee games and I'd love to read more about the company's history and the creation of Duke Nukem 3D! It's too bad that interest in early console gaming overshadows early PC gaming, especially since there were a lot more "hacker"-types working in PC games in the 90s. There's a nice collection of interviews[1] that Apogee did with ma…
Comment linking /catalog/3d-realms-anthology_50/
on “John Carmack's adolescent years (2003)”Found a higher res version of this image on the website for 3D Realms (formerly Apogee back in the day): https://3drealms.com/news/3d-realms-website-turns-20/ Apparently they ran PCBoard [1] for their BBS software. I know a fair amount about BBS software, and had no idea PCBoard could support this many nodes. Typically high node count boards of this time ran MajorBBS [2] instead, since it did its own multi-tasking a…
Comment linking /news/3d-realms-website-turns-20/
on “An old photo of a large BBS”Unshortened link: http://www.3drealms.com/bio/images/legacy_romero2.jpg
Comment linking /bio/images/legacy_romero2.jpg
on “Wikipedia: Making of Doom”Reminds me of game companies that distributed their shareware games with similar tactics via BBSs. You can even see vestigial evidence of this today. Check out the Apogee / 3D Realms download page ( http://www.3drealms.com/downloads.html ), and note the non-insignificant number of filenames that start with the number 1. This caused the files to sort first on most BBSs.
Comment linking /downloads.html
on “Developers furious over App Store “Line Cutting””
