Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Matt Chat Interview with Scott Miller

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 21, 2011

If you don’t know who shareware pioneer and long-time game entrepreneur Scott Miller is, you should definitely watch this interview. And if you do know who Scott Miller is, then you should watch this interview … uh… even more definitely. Yeah, okay. It’s just good.

For those who don’t know: Think Apogee Software, 3D Realms… Kingdom of Kroz (that’s Kroz, not Zork!), Commander Keen, Rise of the Triad, Wolfenstein 3D, Raptor, Duke Nukem 3D, and more recently stuff like Prey and Max Payne.He’s pretty much the guy who lit the fire under the principles who founded id Software. And he’s got some very interesting views on game studios, maintaining independence, marketing, and the like.

This interview focuses on his new efforts with Radar, and the very early days of his game development experience leading up to the creation of Apogee and recruiting other game authors. Interesting points here include discussion on making movies based on games (and vice versa), why Star Wars is a better film property for transforming into an interactive game than Star Trek, programming on a 1975 Wang desktop computer, and how the fight against piracy helped form his episodic shareware success formula.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the interview. I offer big kudos to Matt Barton of Armchair Arcade for these interviews!


Filed Under: Interviews - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



  • UDM said,

    I’ve always enjoyed Matt’s videos. Love his interviews, even though his shelf always makes me jealous :P.

    Oh and Scott Miller!!!! \o/
    (all things considered, he still looks very young hah)

    If anyone’s interested, you can find Scott’s blog here too:
    http://dukenukem.typepad.com/

    Back on topic, I really appreciate his honesty and vision. I haven’t really followed up on his views of late though, especially with DNF.

  • McTeddy said,

    You know… I owe Coyote for introducing me to Matt Chat… and for that I am grateful.

    As for Scott Miller… I didn’t know who he was and I still don’t think I’m all that interested in finding out. He seemed to be very negative and harsh about everything that doesn’t match his view of “correct”. Smart guy or not… I just don’t think I could listen to him for too long without getting annoyed.

    One thing that did strike me though… was when he said “BBC owners would take down the game when they saw that was pirated”

    Oh, how the world has changed.

  • UDM said,

    Just read Scott’s blog and realized it’s dead. Hasn’t been updated since 2008 🙁

  • UDM said,

    McTeddy: IMO his most important contribution was the founding of Apogee, and from there springboarded shareware distribution.

    I was just doing a quick lookup on him, and I had no idea he worked on so many games, including Terminal Velocity (my favourite game from Apogee) and Raptor.

  • UDM said,

    (bah change that to “favourite game from 3DR”)

  • skavenhorde said,

    Interesting idea this radar thing.

    One IP I would add to his list is Firefly. Great TV show and movie that would transfer over very easily to games, books or comics.

    A Privateer style game set in the Firefly universe would be this nerds dream come true.

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