Frenkel, on 24 July 2016 - 02:19 PM, said:
That thought didn't occur to me. That's also a nice explanation.
Hopefully not to derail the topic, I've always assumed that the convention of naming Apogee model shareware distributions starting with number 1 wasn't solely to get them onto or near the top of the file list - it was to indicate that the archive contained the first episode of the respective game. For Apogee/3D Realms, the only exceptions to this are the 3D Realms titles, all of which are named starting with a 3D instead.
Curiously, id Software and Raven Software seem to have never adopted this convention at all, but other shareware game developers and publishers (like
MVP Software and, to a limited extent,
Epic MegaGames) appear to have followed suit - possibly, too, hoping to get their files more attention by getting them higher on the alphabetically sorted file list. Note that there were other tricks to "up" a file, like adding a $ or # character at the start of the file name. I'm not sure if this was something originating with the developers/publishers or BBS sysops though.