History

The History of Beem Media

Background

To be clear, Beem Media is a one man show. Names used, such as B.M. Software, Beem Software, and Beem Media, all refer to one person. Whenever the terms “we” or “our” are used, they refer to one person. Beem Media is a legal entity, but it has only ever had one employee. Everything Beem Media has produced, was produced by one person, which means, yes, this very paragraph referring to that person is written by that person in the third person. Beem Media is, and always has been, Blaine Myers.

Early Years

Blaine Myers founded B.M. Software in 1997 when he was 14 years old. This was shortly after his family acquired their first computer and he had learned a few QBasic “commands” from a friend. Castle was developed shortly thereafter.

In the following years Blaine continued to develop skills in QBasic and Bomb, Archer, Joe’s Copter, and Night Killers 2 were developed and attributed to B.M. Software.

The development of Joe’s Copter 2: The Revenge began shortly after the completion of Joe’s Copter. (Which was a strange choice to make since Joe’s Copter could barely be considered a game by any standard.)

Sometime during that period, Blaine had gotten access to the internet and looked to see if www.bmsoftware.com was a registered domain, and sure enough it was. (Weirdly enough, it still exists to this day, but at that time they were limited to Religious Software sales). After discovering this, Blaine wanted to change the name of his company. Beem Software was born. Beem Software is literally “Be Em” Software. Get it?

Beem Software

Blaine had been obsessed with Might and Magic from a very young age, and he had acquired Might and Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but the battery on his cartridge must have been bad because he kept losing his progress and so he decided to program his own Might and Magic game for the PC, where save games would be more reliable. That game would become E.X.P.L.O.R.: A New World.

In 1999 Blaine acquired his first computer. No longer relegated to sharing a computer with his family, his software engineering skills progressed full throttle. He switched from using QBasic to C. His first game, Castle, was endlessly iterated upon as he learned new technologies. After learning C++, the ScrollGIN Engine began development and the Joe’s Copter 2 demo was ported to it. He also began learning 3D technologies since that seemed to be the future of gaming.

EXPLOR went through a lot of iterations during this time, with two QBasic beta versions being released, as well as a third C++ version.

Tech Development Years

From 2006 to 2008 Beem’s first 3D engine was developed, the Legacy 3D Engine.

In 2008 that engine was scrapped because it had become too much of a mess to continue maintaining. The Emergence Engine (source code coming soon) was developed as an answer to all the problematic parts of the Legacy Engine.

Video game tech was not the only pursuit of Beem during this time. Web technology was also developed, including the content management system RC Publisher. (RC Publisher was ultimately scrapped in 2018 due to WordPress being a much better option.)

Development of Emergence continued until 2011 when Blaine began working professionally in the video games industry. Due to professional restraints Beem Software could no longer operate and was put on hiatus.

Beem Media

In 2015 those restraints were lifted and Beem was back in action. Production on EXPLOR started immediately. The game was built from the ground up using Emergence Technology. At that time Blaine also had additional interests in becoming a YouTuber, so the company was renamed to Beem Media to represent it’s goal to create all forms of entertainment.

While Beem Media experimented with several YouTube channels, none of them gained traction, so most of the focus was on video game development. Consequently, as a joke for a YouTube channel DUMB: Infernal was developed over a weekend using Emergence Engine. EXPLOR was still the main focus, though.

Finally in 2021, over 20 years after it began development, E.X.P.L.O.R.: A New World was released. Financially, it was a complete utter failure, but Beem had no regrets since it never was about making money, just about passion. Blaine is proud of the game, he made the game he wanted to play.

Continuing forward the mistakes made during the development of Emergence have been answered by the development of Emergence Engine 2 (source code coming soon). Beem currently has a few other projects in the works, though admittedly the schedule for those projects is a bit lax.