The History of Trogladite Software
Trogladite Software started life in February 1996 as 'NBA Productions'. This stood for Nothing But Amiga Productions, and was simply a name used for simple games I was attempting to make at the time, none of which ever got finished. As I (Neil) got more familiar with programming, I changed the name to Trogladite Software in late 1996.
However, it was still to be a long time before we hit the
sort of userbase we now get for our products. The first thing
I ever tried to do for Trogsoft was a diskmag, called Amiga
Beginner, aimed at beginners (obviously . This didn't take off, although it was
released into the public domain and if anyone has a copy, I'd
be very grateful to see it again
I did try making a few games, one of which was called
'Extreme Violence' and featured some very technical
programming (or, at least by my standards back then. It was basically a 'viewed from above
UFO Enemy Unknown clone'. It even had the 'if there's a wall
in the way, you can't seen an alien' features (which was very
hard to do). But it never got finished.
By now it was late 1997. Nothing else happened until early 1998, when I started contributing to Amiga Format CD's with a few crappy program's I'd made either in AmigaDOS or AMOS. I contributed 3 times before going quiet, and starting on a new diskmag called World Of Amiga in September 1998. I was planning to make this a brilliant launch issue for the mag, so it would be jam packed, but all was lost when my hard disk broke and lost everything... or was it...
It was December 1998 now and I was finally on the Internet. I had been trying to publicise the diskmag's launch (I'd managed to find a pre-release copy of WOA on a disk which only had a few of the articles on it, but it was sufficient for one issue). The advertising didn't go so well, and only 14 people downloaded it... Undeterred, I started on a second issue.
About halfway through the issue, I met Sam Brookes online, and he became Co-editor for the mag (and still is). We finished issue 2, and sucessfully advertised it, gaining 398 readers from the Trogsoft site alone. Sam ran an organisation called 'AMI-Gerbil Software' which had made various games for Amiga Format's Reader Games section. I met some of his 'associates' like Peter Measham and Keith Owen.
Trogladite Software had been putting out thousands (well, several) news releases per week to Amiga.org, who advised me to limit it to 1 per week or people would get sick of the name Trogladite Software. We started to release products such as UnInstaller, AddAssign and UCM, and me and Sam started speculating about joining forces.
Just after the merge was completed, we advertised for more WOA writers, and were got replies from Joe Solinsky, Frank Mathieson and Phil Ellis, who are still part of the team today. We later advertised for more actual Trogsoft staff, and we got Scott Fulford (graphics) and various others...
That brings us nearly up to date. A couple of months after we'd advertised for the first batch of staff, we advertised for more, taking us to a grand total of 31 members, and some very skilled Graphicians, Musicians and Developers, along with some very useful testers and the World Of Amiga team.
During all of this, we have taken over a prominent Disk Magazine group called Point Productions, along with one of the longest running Amiga disk magazines ever, called The-Point, which we intend to re-release to the world very soon...
We are now working on several commercial releases, including one top secret project, and one space adventure/strategy game called Recovery:2190 and we hope to make UCM 2 commercial if it is good enough.