Prerelease:Prey (2006)/1995

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:Prey (2006).

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To do: Sources for everything said here. Find more info from this year of development.

February 1995

After finishing work on Rise of the Triad, the self-proclaimed Developers of Incredible Power (DIP) would start planning their next game. They eventually settle on a "dark Sci-Fi game".

July 1995

Work on Prey begins, with Tom Hall as project lead and William Scarboro as lead programmer.

October 1995

ITEM #1: 3D Realms recently hired Billy Zelsnack, giving 3D Realms arguably the best group of 3D programming talent in the gaming industry. Billy is considered by John Carmack, lead programmer at id Software, to be one of the best in the business. Billy, along with Ken Silverman (author of the Build 3D engine), and the 3D Realms' Prey team (William Scarboro, Mark Dochtermann, Jim Dose'), give 3D Realms an incredible foundation of 3D programming talent that no other company can match. The results of this talent will soon be seen with the release of Duke Nukem 3D, and many future 3D games.

November 1995

November 9th

A build of the game is compiled. This build is more of a tech demo and seems to have been shown to GT Interactive as a pitch.

November 13th(?)

A series of screenshots would be published.

To do: Was file_id_diz.txt (included with some archives of the shots) and any of the information in it originally from Apogee/3D Realms? More context on these screenshots (like where they came from) would be nice.

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  prey0001.gif

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  prey0003.gif

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  prey0006.gif

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  prey0011.gif

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  prey0012.gif

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  prey0016.gif

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  prey0017.gif

November 16th

A webpage for Prey is published on 3D Realms' website.

References

• https://matero.net/games/prey/history.htm
• https://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1995/11/apogee_live_sho.html
• Infor from Broussard from Lon Matero's Prey FAQ.

The concept for Prey started right after Rise of the Triad. All we knew was that we wanted to do a dark Sci-Fi game. The game initially started probably about July or so in 1995, but this was the very early R&D stages. We were deciding what to do for an engine and whether we could use the Build engine (Duke 3D), or another engine Ken Silverman was doing at the time that was true 3D. We decided to roll the dice and write our own engine at that point, so the team started digging into writing their first 3D engine.

The team was very small at first (mainly coders trying to write an engine we could use). It took a little while to get things going, since we had never written an advanced 3D engine in house and there was a lot of experimenting, but in 3-4 months William had a true 3D texture mapped and lit engine up and running.