Capstone Software

~ the goodbye ~

Capstone was the game label of IntraCorp, a Miami company that started in 1984 and spent its early years on chess programs and stock market simulations. By 1992 there were forty people on the payroll. By 1994 the company was turning over more than ten million dollars a year, most of it on boxes with a familiar name across the front.

The catalog is what Capstone is remembered for, and it is not remembered kindly. Home Alone and The Beverly Hillbillies came off film and television licenses that were cheap by the time anyone in Florida could afford them. The shooters rented id Software's Wolfenstein 3D engine: Operation Body Count and Corridor 7: Alien Invasion both shipped in 1994, both slower and uglier than the game whose code they were running on.

IntraCorp went bankrupt in 1996 and every part of it stopped at once. Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance had gone out earlier that year. Corridor 8: Galactic Wars never got past a prototype and has still never been released. No buyer took the catalog, and there was no successor label to carry the name.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two engines, both rented ~

The thing worth knowing about Capstone is that it was first to Build. Ken Silverman had been writing the engine under contract to 3D Realms since June 1993, and Duke Nukem 3D was the game it was being written for. The first two commercial products to ship on it were Capstone's: William Shatner's TekWar in 1995, and Witchaven the same year, a sword and sorcery shooter with experience points and a melee system that arrived a full year ahead of Duke.

Being first bought nothing. Both games reviewed badly enough that the engine's reputation had to be built by somebody else, and it was. Duke Nukem 3D is what Build means everywhere, including here, which is the only way any of this reached Turkey at all: as a technology carried in under a name belonging to a different company in Texas, two years after the Miami outfit that shipped it first had already closed. I got my first modem in 1998 and none of this had left a trace anyone could see.

~ the condo years ~

What happened to the engine afterward is the part nobody expects. Capstone's remains became VRTech, which used Build to make first-person walkthroughs of Miami condominium buildings that had not been constructed yet. A buyer could move through an apartment before the concrete was poured, in a renderer built for corridors full of monsters.

It is a perfectly reasonable use of a 1995 sector renderer, and it is the most Miami ending available to a Florida software company that spent a decade filling retail racks. VRTech closed too, at some point, with nobody writing down the date.

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