The beginning of the 1990s saw an important revolution in home console gaming, with Nintendo and Sega dominating the thick of the decade and Sony and XBox joining the fray by the end of it.

However, games up to that point were something you bought on a cartridge and popped into the side of the Commodore console hooked up to a TV set, exactly like any Atari or Nintendo. To be sure, games for the home computer existed well back into the ’80s and even ’70s. These were the years when PC video games were for just us dorks. What we mean instead is that we miss the time of Apogee. No doubt about it, anytime you’re nostalgic for the true DOS gaming experience of Apogee, you’re only a couple clicks away. If you’re limited to mobile and not geek enough to get DOSBox going on Android, the Internet Archive even has you covered there with a few playable Apogee titles emulated right in the web browser. Even if it ran on a desktop, it ran in a sandboxed DOS emulation mode. Just about everything Apogee / 3D Realms released in the 1990s was DOS only.

You’ll need DOSBox to run them, of course. For the classic shareware releases, a dozen or so free DOS legacy download sites are out there with an Apogee Software section, such as DOS Games Archive. Yes, they even have a wing dedicated to Apogee Classics, which are variously available on Steam, Gog, or even for plain old free download. They changed their name to 3D Realms in 1996, and they continue to do business today on the 3D Realms site. Technically speaking, Apogee Software is not gone.

Id software quake dos free download