It’s no secret I worked for Apogee/3D Realms from 14 Dec 1992 through 23 May 2009.  In all that time, I wore a lot of hats for the company.  I’m not here to write about that – I’ve done that before elsewhere on this blog.  But I bring that up because I was there a long time.  There were many dozens of games released by the company I worked for, or by friends who I worked with who went elsewhere.  During all that time, I amassed a pretty huge collection of game boxes.  When I was still at Apogee, they lived on bookshelves in my office.

Then in 2009 when Apogee laid off the dev studio (including myself), I brought home a lot of this stuff.  A few things that didn’t belong to me (like the Rise of the Triad models, and some demo and dev specific stuff I gave back to them as I walked out the door).  But my collection of game boxes I amassed for myself I took with me.  Was a lot.

In the years past the end of Apogee, it took me a few years to find a new permanent gig – which I still have to this day.  But in the years in-between, things were rough – and some of the merch and swag I had I sold off for money.  Not all mind, you – I still had a healthy amount left after that, which took up several boxes in my home office.

.. and then it just sat there.  I didn’t do much with them.  I have so much of my own crap at home that I wouldn’t have the space to put games on my bookshelf like I did at work.  My wife probably would have preferred more bobbleheads.  So the old game archives sat in U-Haul boxes under my desk.  Then about three months ago, I was going through my home office.  You know how things get slopped up over time if you don’t keep up?  Well, my office was a bit of a mess, so I decided one Saturday to do one of those major cleans.  Huge purges of things.  All of it of a personal nature.  And then I got to my old archive of game boxes.   I wasn’t going to mess with them, because as I said before, I rarely get them out.  The last time I can recall that I got them all out was during covid when I took pictures of nearly everything in there to use for various social media posts – and that article I mentioned earlier.  Since then just once or twice when I needed to look something up.

They took up a lot of space under my desk.  But they still meant something to me.  Those almost 17 years I sent at Apogee in the 90s and 2000’s were some of the  best times of my life.  I didn’t want to put them in a self storage place ($$$), I couldn’t put them in the garage or the attic – I live in Dallas – the heat would destroy all the stuff.  Throwing them out was NEVER an option.

Then I had an epiphany.  About 40 miles or so from me is the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, TX.  I’ve been there many times as a patron.  I’ve taken friends and family from out of town there.  I’ve gotten to know the proprietor of the place well.  I got to meet some of the guys from Activision who made Atari 2600 games from my youth there.  But I digress.   In the middle of my mass clean of my home office, I thought “Let’s donate the lot to NVMUSA”.  So that’s what I did.

It took some time to find a time that fit both our schedules, but today, I loaded up the car, drove to Frisco, and donated nearly my entire archive of old Apogee/3D Realms game boxes that used to be on my shelf at home to the museum.   John told me that he fully intend to use this donation as a a foundation of a future-planned exhibit about local game development.  The museum itself was helped by Randy Pitchford of Gearbox at launch.  It will be a super cool thing for me to see all these items on display in the videogame museum.

I actually already have something there – my old April Fool’s joke I did way back in 2003 – I took my lone, legitimate functional cartridge and donated it to the museum.  It’s on display in a thing about home-brew video games.  haha.  :)

As I age a bit, it feels nice to pass on things so others can see them.  Nobody could see my display in boxes under my desk.  Once John gets the new display up and running, others will too.  Plus there’s so many other game companies in this area that could be part of that.  id Software, Gearbox, Terminal Reality, Nerve Software, plus many that aren’t around anymore.  But the people are.  I look forward to this display at the NVMUSA, and am user glad to have passed on my contribution in this matter.

Thanks for giving the ol’ stuff a great home John.