Gamer's Edge

Gamer's Edge was a bi-monthly disk magazine product published by Softdisk. It was founded by John Romero in August 1990, including a select group including John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and Lane Roathe, and aided from the outside by Tom Hall. Softdisk had made its name publishing monthly disks for the Apple II and other systems, but Romero pitched a bi-monlthy release to allow more time to polish the game releases.

This notably provided a window for John Carmack to experiment with new approaches to game graphics, ultimately leading to the development of adaptive tile refresh. The crew then moonlighted the first Commander Keen game, entitled Invasion of the Vorticons, and published it with shareware distributor wikipedia:Apogee Software on December 14, 1990 as id Software.

This development devastated Softdisk founder Al Vekovious, who had felt the Gamer's Edge line was a rising star. More concerning was that the id founders had even been borrowing Softdisk computers over the weekends to develop Commander Keen. After an initial pitch for Softdisk to publish id games collapsed due to threat of an internal revolt among other Softdisk staff, legal action loomed. In a bid to continue the fruitful business relationship, a contract was negotiated that obligated id to keep making titles for Gamer's Edge through to 1991 (although ScubaVenture: The Search for Pirate's Treasure was actually developed by Apogee to allow id to focus on Wolfenstein 3D).

The deal gave Softdisk access to several pieces of Carmack's technology and Romero's design tools, most notably the scrolling engine from Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion and the texture mapped pseudo-3D worlds of Catacomb 3D. Greg Malone III of Origin Systems, and a team including Mike Maynard and Jim Row, were brought on to produce additional games. This lead to the Catacomb Adventure Series and several sequels to Dangerous Dave. Even Carmack's Dark Designs received new instalments for Softdisk's Apple II line, although this was done outside of Gamer's Edge.

In 1992 Maynard and Row left to found JAM Productions, joined by artist Jerry Jones. Greg Malone ultimately moved on to work as a producer for 3D Realms, Apogee's later re-branding. Softdisk continued publishing games, most notably In Pursuit of Greed and Alien Rampage'', but left the industry by the late 1990s.