I grew up in what I consider to be one of the best eras in gaming, namely the mid to late 80s and early 90s. This was the era of the 8 bit and 16 bit juggernauts by Nintendo and Sega, and while it was years later when I first experienced it NEC as well. However there was something else going on that damned near knocked me out of console gaming entirely. In 1991 my family got our very first computer, a no-name 386 16 mhz with a massive 90 mb hard drive and 2 mb of ram. There was no sound card and we were still several years ahead of CD-ROMs being a thing that you would regularly see in a computer. However the same friend of my dad that used to send him home VHS tapes filled with movies from HBO, used to send me floppies loaded with games for me to play on our new computer. Howard was a member of a BBS, an through that he would get all sorts of things some what I would later learn as “Warez” and others something called “Shareware”.
For those not old enough to remember this era, the idea was simple. A company would release one fully playable level of a game and distribute it freely on Bulletin Board Systems and FTP sites. Folks would download it, play it, and if they liked it you could buy a code that would unlock the full version of the game and let you play the rest of the levels. They also distributed their entire catalog of games in an ASCII text file format along with all of the pertinent information on how to purchase the games. Being a teenager and not having access to a credit card, it would be years before I was able to play the full versions of most of these games. For example I played Spear of Destiny long before I actually played any level of Wolfenstein other than the first one. The same is true with Doom and having played Doom II before the later episodes, in part because in both of these cases they got a physical release stocked at our local Walmart that didn’t require me to convince my parents to give someone a credit card number over the phone.
The first of these titles that I played were the original Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, and I remember at the time not being able to understand why these games were not released for the Nintendo or Super Nintendo. I was completely unaware of the proud history of effectively home brew game development on Computers like the Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 64 because I simply wasn’t exposed to it at the time. All I really knew was the original Atari 2600, and then the 8 bit and 16 bit era consoles. It was after I got access to the internet that I more or less descended into the madness of all of the other options and got heavily into the Amiga scene when I picked up a 3000. At this time however it was extremely common place for ALL major game releases to offer a freely downloadable demo. When CD-Rom entered the scene is was extremely common for a Games magazine to have a pack in CD filled with demos of various products that were either out or coming soon.
This wasn’t just a computer thing either. During the PlayStation and Dreamcast era, I remember demo cds for both systems in regular circulation. I used to subscribe to a PlayStation magazine, and each month there would be a CD included that had short demos for a lot of the titles that were just about to release. Once you moved into the PlayStation 2 and Xbox era of game consoles, the demos existed but were significantly less common. When you arrived at the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, the concept of downloading a demo had more or less been forgotten by developers. The era of try before you buy was a thing of the past, and this was also the era of several game releases becoming controversial for not quite living up to expectations.
While none of this is Shareware, I find it interesting that at some point over the last few years something changed. Nintendo Handheld devices have often had downloadable demos to sort of whet your appetite and get you interested in buying the full game. When Nintendo released the Switch I started noticing how many of these first party and major third party games had a fully playable demo that you could download ahead of time. Not only was the game playable, but often times you could pick up where you left off in your save file giving you further incentive to pay some money to continue that gaming experience. For example I absolutely played the Demo for Trials of Mana, and while I decided to start fresh after-all with a different party, I could have easily just picked up where I left off.
This is a trend however that might have been happening under my nose for longer than I realized. Now that I look around it seems like there are many digital storefronts offering demos, and that might be what ultimately changed. Digital distribution, just like in the golden age of shareware, has become more a primary means of getting titles out to the public. It costs money to press a demo cd and distribute it out to the stores, but uploading a demo version to a store front is effectively free. It feels like maybe we are just about to go through a second age of Shareware, and while you are not downloading the games from some University hosted FTP server that you found through Gopher, you are still downloading them freely. So if you are curious what is available in demo form you can check out the following Storefront links that should in theory bring you right to the demo sections.
As someone who often writes impressions of games that he is enjoying, I should start digging up links to see if demos are available for that game. I can write all I want to tell you how cool I think something is, but giving you access to download freely and see for yourself is significantly more powerful.
Have you seen this series of posts? https://www.filfre.net/2020/04/the-shareware-scene-part-1-the-pioneers/
One thing that’s been also happening lately/recently are the “free weekends” on Steam. It’s not an on-demand demo, but for those companies that don’t have a demo version of their game, they simply open up access to download and play for a couple days. A limited time demo, of sorts, rather than limiting content.
I ran a Mac BBS from 1990 to 1995 and shareware was a big part of what got people dialing up. In the era before internet connectivity was expected of people getting patches and updates was also a big driver for BBSes. There used to be a CD-ROM put out regularly by a Mac user group called BBS in a Box that would compile current versions of all sorts of shareware, freeware, and demos. I had a CD-ROM drive hooked up to my BBS machine so users could access the latest version.
Of course, new users would show up all the time and ask me where the “warez” (cracked commercial software) and porn was. Some things never change.
There was indeed a lot to love about this era of gaming. Full games were hard to come by for me too, for much the same reason as you — giving out credit card details over the phone just wasn’t going to happen.
So I got to a play a great deal of the first episode of Doom 1 and Wolfenstein, heck even Quake although that was much later. With Commander Keen I was lucky, and received 1-4 with my PC, along with Dangerous Dave, Duke Nukem 1 and 2 (of the original set; although I later did get my hands on the ‘newer’ Duke Nukem side scroller… I forget how they even labeled that one now).
Getting the SB16 + 2x CD-Drive was a revelation though; it came with a boatload of games including Return to Zork which I must’ve spent endless hours on learning to beat.
But more even than the games it came with, it opened up the ability to buy those CDs with just masses of shareware titles on them. Hours upon hours of entertainment (although with an almost equal measure of disappointment at times, with how limited shareware was becoming by that point. Down to levels as you mentioned, rather than whole episodes, in many cases.)
In Commander Keen’s case, they were originally making a Mario clone for the PC and offered it to Nintendo. They passed, so they flipped the assets and came out with Commander Keen. So, they tried with Nintendo 🙂
Once upon a time, my business cards listed my title as “Demo Wrangler.” It was might job to put together the demo CDs that were packed in with Strategy+ Magazine. That was a pretty fun job.
That is freaking awesome. I loved those pack in CDs so much.
Maybe the freemium/free to play trend has a hand in this.
I absolutely think that we are in an era where lowering the barrier of entry is a good thing, considering how deluged with new titles we are constantly. I think that was another aspect of the Shareware era, was that there were just so many games available in this manner. Later on I remember seeing CDs you could pick up at walmart with like 3000 shareware titles, prior to cleaning out my office a few years ago I probably had a few of these.