Following its release just last week as part of the Apogee Throwback Pack, as well as a freebie with Rise of the Triad, Blake Stone: Planet Strike's source code was just released to the public.
Apogee confirms the nearly 30 year old code was once considered lost. COO Terry Nagy reveals that he approached creator Mike Maynard for approval, and they were able to retrieve 3.5 floppies to get the data from.
Established in 1985, Apogee is one of the more long lived PC developers still active, particularly known for the Duke Nukem games under their rebranding as 3DRealms. However, Apogee's original games Blake Stone and Return of the Triad were cherished by FPS fans as some of the games that defined the genre.
More recently, 3DRealms decided to bring back the Apogee and sold the company's older assets to a new company, Apogee Software, LLC.
Last year, Jordan Mechner also released the source code of his classic Prince of Persia. The data is provided in its own Github repository, and Mechner provided a document explaining how to use the code.
The gaming industry does not have the best history when it comes to video game preservation. However, the growing popularity of the original devs themselves releasing the source for older games points to a shift in preservation efforts, from the developers to dedicated fans. People are already blogging about using the Blake Stone source code.
Blake Stone's source code will be released under GPL 2.0, so devs can freely make changes and derivative works. if you'd like to play around with the code yourself, hit up the source link below. On a related note, read our interview with Apogee here.
