1995

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

Prey's long development history begins.

To do: Find more info from this year of development. Probably lots of stuff from places like Usenet archives. According to this January 1998 interview from The Adrenaline Vault, Joe Seigler teased Prey in a FidoNet post from the summer of 1995 (June-August). He reportedly mentioned that 3D Realms had just completed the programming of a Quake-style engine, and that they were commencing development of a game that would have "all the bells and whistles" of Quake.

February 1995#

After finishing work on Rise of the Triad, the self-proclaimed "Developers of Incredible Power" (DIP) would start planning their next game. President of 3D Realms and producer George Broussard would recount the early days of the project in Lon Matero's Prey FAQ.¹

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.² 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.

July 1995#

Work on Prey begins, with Tom Hall as project lead and William Scarboro as lead programmer. Broussard once again via the Prey FAQ.

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.

September 1995#

Prey is added to the "Official" Apogee FAQ by Samuel Stoddard in v5.0, published on September 1st (this version was later included with the retail release of Duke Nukem 3D v1.3D). The FAQ included a single mention in a section for upcoming releases touted the game's genre as "3D Action" action and a release for the following year in 1996.

October 1995#

³

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#

The game's very first prerelease screenshots would be published in a archive named PREYPIX1.ZIP. Another with gamma corrected versions of the images was also released as PREYPIX1A.ZIP.

The archives included file_id_diz.txt includes a description of the images:

This archive contains a few screen shots
from Prey, a game from 3D Realms coming 
in 3rdQ/1996. 

November 16th#

A webpage for Prey is published on 3D Realms' website.⁴

November 29th#

3D Realm's "Live Shot" online camera would be launched, with a news piece made about this. 3D Realms uses the prospect of a photo with a developer's monitor showing Duke Nukem 3D or Prey as temptation to users to watch the page.⁵

Footnotes/References#

Footnotes#

References#