Awesome! Good to see more classics coming to GOG.

Before John Carmack and John Romero would go on to perfect the FPS with Wolfenstein 3D. They made a couple other lesser known FPS games for Softdisk. Catacomb 3D and Hovertank 3D.

After the guys left to form id Software, Softdisk made three more Catacomb games themselves. Abyss, Apocalypse and Armageddon.

You shoot fireballs from your hand, collect keys, treasures, health and pattern shots, which allow you to shoot quickly for a moment.

Catacombs 3D is the 3D game that John Carmack worked on before leaving Softdisk to found iD software and creating Wolfenstein 3D. Most of the games were created using his engine after he left Softdisk.

They're good games over all, I've been playing and for the time they're quite remarkable. But, the controls aren't the greatest, especially for the first game, and turning can be a bit inefficient at times.

It was interesting to hear John talking about how many mistakes he avoided in Wolf3D that he had made with The Catacombs 3D.

They're fun, but they're small and they have their quirks. I personally, think that they're must plays for fans of the FPS genre, just for the context and the history. For the time they introduced a fair number of ideas that are now just assumed, but at that time there weren't many games out there of this genre.

Sounds like GOG could get a real significant piece of PC gaming history here. Very interesting.

As it is, unless you know that the flatrocksoftware store exists, you wouldn't know that you could buy the software there. So, I'm guessing that even after GOG takes its cut, that the owner of the copyrights will still be making a lot more money on the property.

But, I think more importantly, flatrock apparently owns the softdisk catalog, which could mean all sorts of other obscure games coming here as well. Some of them are legally free now, but there's some pretty significant games on the list. I think the main problem would be that some of the series aren't long enough to justify $5.99 for the set.

Off the top of my head some notable ones would be:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/alien-rampage (Highly underrated!)
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/commander-keen-keen-dreams
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/shadow-knights
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/scubaventure-the-search-for-pirates-treasure
http://www.mobygames.com/game/chagunitzu
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dark-designs-i-grelminars-staff
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dark-designs-ii-closing-the-gate
http://www.mobygames.com/game/hovertank
http://www.mobygames.com/game/paragon
http://www.mobygames.com/game/in-pursuit-of-greed
http://www.mobygames.com/game/rescue-rover
http://www.mobygames.com/game/rescue-rover-2
http://www.mobygames.com/game/xenopods

And if you want to get really old school:

http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/kroz-series
http://www.mobygames.com/game/pyramids-of-egypt

So yeah, if they do own Softdisk's catalog, lots of real interesting games in there.

I don't know if Flat Rock owns the entire catalog or not. What games are legally free now?

Most of the Softdisk-released freebies are offered by Apogee/3D Realms http://www.3drealms.com/downloads.html

I guess I don't know Softdisk's catalog enough to know which of those are by Softdisk. I thought all of those were just by Apogee.

Pretty much everything that's older than Wolf 3D is a Softdisk product as that's where the most prominent iD people were working prior to founding iD.

So we're getting Alien Rampage? Yay!

I'm aware of their history. A lot of my early PC gaming came from Apogee and ID.

The only things I see on that page that are connected with Softdisk are a couple of the Kroz games and that only because I looked at the list of games for Softdisk on MobyGames.

The freeware games there are, from what I see and know, were developed and/or published by Apogee and have very little to do with Softdisk, except for maybe those who worked on each game.

Apogee didn't develop any of those games, they published some of them, but they weren't developing. Apogee was developing their own games and the folks at iD were never working directly for Apogee other than with Apogee as their publisher.

Right. This I knew. I just don't see how Softdisk's software would be given out as freeware by Apogee. Apogee only has the right to do that for the software they developed, such as Kroz and Biomenace, but they can't for Blake Stone.

Where do Apogee and Softdisk cross other than the ID guys? Just curious.

The only ones I'm seeing for free were the ones developed by Apogee for publishing by Softdisk.

You'll find that a lot of the guys back then moved between companies as disputes held up, and at that point there were a small number of studios engaged in similar games. Softdisk former employees founded both iD and Apogee.

The first game that Apogee released was the Softdisk title they did was Kroz.

I guess it is a tad complicated, but I think the answer is probably going to depend on the contracts signed.