I found a quite interesting historical artifact on Apogee Entertainment’s Facebook profile—the letter in which they offered developers and publishers the opportunity to sign a contract for the use of the graphics engine ‘Build’ developed by Ken Silverman.
I see several implications in what I read, first of all an aggressive comparison between Build and the engine developed by ID for Doom and Heretic. In this regard, for a long time I believed that Duke 3D and Doom shared the same technology.
The similarities between the two engines are numerous, although I recognize that the Duke developers demonstrated greater creativity in the environments, which also had a significantly higher interaction with scene objects. However, knowing that Build was created by a single person, just like in the old times when the best ideas were born in garages, evokes immense admiration for Ken Silverman, the developer behind Build. He was soon overshadowed by the wonders of the Quake Engine, but that’s another story.
Ken Silverman worked for Apogee during the golden age of FPS, developing the Build Engine for them. However, the 3D titles released by the publisher were labeled as ‘3D Realms’, which has no connection to the current publisher with the same name. If you want to clarify your doubts regarding this matter, I recommend visiting the post of Scott Miller, founder of Apogee.
Incredibly, the Build Engine is still alive and supports some well-appreciated recent titles such as Ion Fury (in my todo list), published by the new 3D Realms. As you can see in the following screenshots, this engine is still rockin’.
