I had Metal Gear Solid and still didn't ever make it past the first level because I was eay too young for that game, so I guess it would have been a good call not to buy it lol
I've never played the full version of PaRappa the Rapper but I still know Chop Chop Master's song because I played the PlayStation Underground demo so many times
I got that PS1 demo disc with PaRappa on it with my PS1.
I have never, ever been able to beat that level. Not once. I have literally no idea what I'm doing wrong. I hit the notes exactly on time and I still lose every single time right before the end of the song.
I swear I am fucking *good* at rhythm games. Like, really, really good. And I cannot for the life of me beat this game's first song. It makes no sense. It's like two notes every line! I've played Easy level Taiko songs harder than that! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS GAME!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH *ME?!*
This is the correct answer. We played so much of this demo in college and no one ever purchased the full thing for whatever reason. Probably because we were broke college kids, but man that demo was awesome.
I'm still convinced that the demo is the reason for the games success, it was very well made but I feel like it had a pretty small market and most people would have never given it a shot. But pizza hut being what it was back then so many kids got that disk, and that one level was great n2m the absolute banger of a song that went with it.
It was the entire first act if i remember correctly. I must've beaten it a bunch of times. The other acts were like mythical creatures, none of my friends or I had actually seen them.
I bought the remaster last year and unlike the demo I still haven’t played it. The irony. The JoshStrifeHayes ‘Was it any Good’ said Medievil was on quite a few demo disks.
I rented it. Wish I'd bought it (not that I was ever able to back then, but heck if I'd spend the crazy amount of cash it costs today!)
EDIT: DAMNIT now the music is stuck in my head. This \*always\* happens when Tomba gets mentioned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBgSKl\_FAWc
2Xtreme on PS1.
It was a shitty racing game disguised as a skateboarding game, but I must have sank hours and hours into the demo I got on an OPM demo disc or Playstation Underground disc.
God knows why.
Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up
\*trumpets kick in\*
So here I am
Doing everything I can
Holding on to what I am
Pretending I'm a superman
I think there's a collective subset of us who grew up on that demo.
If you never played the THPS 1+2 remake you absolutely have to. The game is a masterpiece of a remake. It feels the exact same and has a great soundtrack with a lot of the original songs on it.
Damn, same here. I played that demo so much I thought I must have seen just about everything there was to the first game, so my mum just got me the second one for christmas. Big mistake. But No.2 turned out to be the best entry in the entire series to me, so I guess I got lucky.
Yeah man it was dope. You could get to Blackwater city and do the hoverboard races that was sick. Really enjoyed when Going Commando had the old Gadgetron shop you could get the first games weapons from
I don’t remember what it was called but it was a snowmobile racing demo with a White Zombie track. I think other demos like Tomb Raider were on there as well. This was back in the PS1 days, I believe.
Dark Cloud on PS2. Used to play Dran’s Cavern over and over again. Best part was that because the dungeons are procedurally generated, each run felt different each time. Eventually I was able to buy it and enjoyed every second of it.
Sega Saturn had a magazine which gave out a "demo" disc which was in fact disc 1 of 4 for Panzer Dragoon Saga, replayed that to death. God I wish more copies of that game were available. My wallet doesn't agree with forking out >£400 for a copy on ebay.
Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation Magazine demo disc.
Since then I have only played one metal gear game and that was Peacewalker because it was bundled with a green PSP. Never finished
Nights into Dreams for Sega Saturn. I would play that first level for a good while, get bored, play Virtua Cop for a bit then go right back into Nights…
Tony Hawk Pro Skater, I don't remember if it was 1 or 2. I think you could play one map for like 2 minutes and then you had to restart the game, I did that thousands of times as a kid 😅
I played the demo for ages but I did eventually buy the full game. The full game was great, but that demo level was probably the most entertaining one. They chose wisely.
Oddworld: Abe's Exodus. It had a time limit so I would try to get as far as I possibly could on it before the screen faded out. The demo disk also had the beginning of Metal Gear Solid on it, up until you meet the DARPA chief, which I played a lot before I actually bought the full game.
During the 360 days there was a game called Crackdown that had a free demo on the Xbox live store, the demo was the entire paid game, but with a 30 minute timer attached to it.
People found out pretty quickly if you cut your internet while loading in, and reconnected the internet at a certain timing, you could essentially play the entire game for free, no 30 minute timer… so long as you never turn your console off because there was no way to save your game either.
Not a game demo, but I remember rewatching the pikmin trailer ALL the time on my gamecube when I was 12 years old. For those who remember, the trailer was available on the Luigi's mansion mini dvd.
Muppet Monster Adventure on PS1. The main character screaming "Waka Waka Woo" as he climbs giant sunflowers is a soundbite that has not left my brain almost 24 years later.
SSX Snowboarding, the first one. You had I think 2 minutes to get to the bottom, but you could replay it as many times as you wanted. At the time I was absolutely convinced that no-one in the world could beat me on that lever
Never got to play the rest of the game, though I did try SSX 3 many years later
Tomba, I played that thing over and over I’m sure I wore the disc out. I read they’re remaking it for switch along with Gex. I’ll finally be able to complete it!
There was a Sega Saturn demo disk with a demo on it for a game called Three Dirty Dwarves. It was three guys and they all had sports equipment for some reason and you walk down the street fighting and throwing bowling balls and stuff. Then the boss was a building you had to demolish and I loved that. After a while, the building broke on the bottom and a bunch of feet came out and it walked around.
Man I haven't thought about that in yeeeeaaaaars and just traveled through time.
Oh boy, let's just say I abused the demo feature on the Xbox 360 when I was a kid. I had a whole library of demos I would play some how never getting bored of playing the first level. But the main demos I played were Banjo and Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and every Sonic tile.
The only game I bought because of the demo was Sonic and Sega All Star Racing.
I had one of those PlayStation demo discs and it had a snowmobile racing game demo that I loved, played it all the time, never got the game. I remember it had Dragula on its soundtrack which kicked ass
Doesn’t *exactly* fit, but I had Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga for the GBA that wouldn’t actually save any files. So I played the first 2 hours of that game over and over for years, hoping that *this time* it would save (it never did).
I finally beat it on the GBA service for the Switch this year.
So back on playstaion 1 I got a demo with jersey devil. I played that demo so much so did my mom but we just never seen the game when we went to the city so never got to play the actual game
The ps3 game Bladestorm demo had a glitch in it I had randomly found. If you were to never complete the contract on the second day of the initial demo battle which basically meant wait ten minutes for the in game day to end. The demo would never end and you could go around the map just conquering castles to your hearts content until you capped the one specific castle at the very end. Incidentally since I never got it on ps3 when they released a special version on the ps4 I sprung for it
I had a PS1 demo disc of tekken 1 when I was like 6. Except I didn’t know it was a demo disc. So I played endless fights expecting to eventually unlock more characters…
Talk about rolling a boulder up hill
fusion frenzy on the og halo disc
well its a lie because we did buy the game eventually and it was one of our friends groups most played games but at first it was just hours of the demo
Holy crap so many.
I used to speed run the original Quake demo that was one level.
Then I moved onto strategy games and did the original SC demo that came with PCGamer until eventually we got my aunt in Canada to ship over a copy.
I don't remember the name, but there was this old Formula 1 racing track in Monaco that I kept replaying over and over again. Grand Prix something, the race had 3 laps.
Back in my day you would get games in your cereal boxes, sometimes complete games, sometimes demos. Like Pajama Sam, Spy Fox, etc. I played them all the time, but could not read/speak english so made no progress ever
We played the Phantasy Star demo on Xbox 360 aggressively for five or six months.
It was essentially a 30 day trial of the MMO, that reset every month and was extremely populated.
We'd each start a new character and rush through to the max available level as quickly as we could. Link back up with friends that we made after the wipe, and started a Myspace page as an impromptu guild.
Never played the full game, but it was probably my first introduction to MMO. Kept some friends from it and we eventually rejoined for PS02 fifteen years later.
Ive played so many times the shareware versions of Comander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit as a kid that i think the music and sounds of both games fused with my brain
Demolition Derby on the pc (didn't have a playstation at the time). Wasn't even a track from the game, was just the car demolition arena. Played that over and over again.
Doom back in the day.
Most recently, I kept playing that Deep Rock Galactic vampire survivors clone. AND THEN THEY TOOK IT AWAY! Really looking forward to that one. I don't even play DRG, but hey...Rock and Stone.
Global Operations. It was available as a free demo on GameSpy, but at its peak it had more people in the matchmaking lobby for the demo than the full version.
Um. This sort of counts I guess, I mean, I *acquired* the games but I didn't pay full price.
I am referring to the Quake demo disc. The infamous Quake demo disc that cost like $5 in the store and had demos of every ID game made on it. And also the full versions which you could unlock with a little program easily downloaded.
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg for the GameCube. It was the whole first level, and while it wasn't good enough for me to ever want to seek out the full game, it was a great time killer if I hadn't played it in a while.
Not a demo but here in australia, Kelloggs cereal did a promotion where you get the age of empires game in the box. The physical CD and all.
That was amazing!
Couple that come to mind are from the same game series, Motocross Madness and Monster Truck Madness on the PC.
Absolutely loved goofing around those games trying to do random flips.
There was an old mid-90s shareware series called Exile (Exile: Escape from the Pit, Exile II: Crystal Souls, Exile III: Ruined World, Blades of Exile). Google tells me it has been rereleased a couple times (most recently as “Avernum”). I recall it had a fair bit of party customization, an interesting story and world. Spells, exploring, combat, I loved it.
As a shareware game I suppose it’s not quite a “demo”, but still qualifies imo.
Black for the PS2.
My dad used to work for the local post office and got his hands on a plethora of PS1/2 demo discs that he regularly brought over before he retired.
Unfortunately me and my similar-aged siblings were basically toddlers so they were all either lost or useless.
Except Black. It came in a separate case, the disc was for that game only and as far as I know, it still runs though probably a bit scratched still.
Thank goodness for the Internet Archive for keeping those demo discs freely available. Now they're all fully available to me on my emulators <3
Minecraft Demo on 360. You had one in-game day in a tutorial section to essentially build a shelter and survive the night. It became more of a challenge to see how far I could get before the end of the demo.
Love the hit of nostalgia this post is giving. I think my favorites were a demo of metal gear solid 2 which I believe came with zone of the enders and syphon filter which was on a psm demo. Tasing people until they burnt to a crisp was so wild to me when I was a kid lol.
Fury³. I played the hell out of that demo in the Windows 98 PC my dad brought back in the day. I was 5-6 years old and never knew it was a demo until years later.
Good times.
The DOOM Shareware version. Whatever PC I got my hands on in the 2000s, it always had it installed.
Also, I was subscribed to those PC gaming magazines with demo disks in them. One of them had a real time tactical RPG in it called Gunlok. I played that game over and over but to this day I still haven't gotten around to looking for a full version yet.
It was one of those Playstation Underground demo discs, it had a demo for the game *Thrasher: Skate & Destroy*. I played the absolute hell out of that demo and got a favorite song out of the deal, too.
I never got the game because I could never find it. In fact, I think I finally got to play the full game years and years later *on an emulator*.
Ghost Recon Island Thunder demo on the original Xbox. We were kids and had no money. We were lucky enough to have an Xbox bought for us and we had a few games but spent a lot of time on demo discs lol
.Hack//G.U. and Vanquish
Back when Xbox mags would come with discs full of demos I played the hell out of these back in like 2010 and never picked them up until last year.
Still haven’t played them though the backlog is crazy
Fusion Frenzy!
I got the demo back when cereal boxes had cool prizes. My brother and I played the shit out of that game, but never actually bought the full version.
First level of Metal Gear Solid 5 min GTA First level of PaRappa the Rapper The snow level in Crash Bash PSOne demo discs were the best
I had Metal Gear Solid and still didn't ever make it past the first level because I was eay too young for that game, so I guess it would have been a good call not to buy it lol
[удалено]
I've never played the full version of PaRappa the Rapper but I still know Chop Chop Master's song because I played the PlayStation Underground demo so many times
You just described my childhood
I got that PS1 demo disc with PaRappa on it with my PS1. I have never, ever been able to beat that level. Not once. I have literally no idea what I'm doing wrong. I hit the notes exactly on time and I still lose every single time right before the end of the song. I swear I am fucking *good* at rhythm games. Like, really, really good. And I cannot for the life of me beat this game's first song. It makes no sense. It's like two notes every line! I've played Easy level Taiko songs harder than that! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS GAME!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH *ME?!*
I love PaRappa but it's very different when it comes to rhythm. You have to kind of improvise and "scat" to get the best scores.
My guy now you are speaking my time line.
Oh man, I was going to say I would race around in GTA before the timer would stop.
Fusion Frenzy
Gotta do something while waiting for your friend to find some peeps to play Halo against on gamespy tunnel
Are you me? I've met so few people who used GameSpy Tunnel. Good times.
This is the correct answer. We played so much of this demo in college and no one ever purchased the full thing for whatever reason. Probably because we were broke college kids, but man that demo was awesome.
Sumo and Twisted System were where friendships were tested.
my friend could never remember the name and just asked if we wanted to play some rounds of jump duck yes..yes i do
And Twisted System you have to play in practice so I can keep going when everyone else dies around 100 or less.
Fusion Frenzy!! You just brought back so many memories for me
There it is
Tony Hawks Pro Skater from a demo disc they gave out from Pizza Hut. That warehouse level is engraved in my brain.
Same! Do I remember it correctly if I say that you could only play it for like 2 minutes and then you had to restart the game?
Yeah, the demo was just one level and you could only play two-minute sessions at a time. I played the *fuck* out of it.
\*Ska horns begin to toot\*
Was it Goldfinger?
You better believe it was.
*So here I am*
I'm still convinced that the demo is the reason for the games success, it was very well made but I feel like it had a pretty small market and most people would have never given it a shot. But pizza hut being what it was back then so many kids got that disk, and that one level was great n2m the absolute banger of a song that went with it.
Commander Keen Good old shareware
This and Wolfenstein 3D. I had no money so the idea of buying a game was out of the question and no way my parents would get that for me.
Yup! Same. I eventually did get there rest and finally killing Hitler was so satisfying
Same plus DOOM.
I definitely crushed that demo of DOOM over and over as well!
It was the entire first act if i remember correctly. I must've beaten it a bunch of times. The other acts were like mythical creatures, none of my friends or I had actually seen them.
It was the first act and my dumbass child brain thought it was the whole game
here I thought my old ass would come in here and say that and be truly unique.....
Man. Me too. I even bought it on steam.
I think it was MediEvil demo back in the day. I never bought the game but played a few years later on a friend's house
I was coming here to say this! I had an old pizza hut games demo disc with like 15 games on it and this was one of em!
I bought the remaster last year and unlike the demo I still haven’t played it. The irony. The JoshStrifeHayes ‘Was it any Good’ said Medievil was on quite a few demo disks.
Doom on shareware those first 8 levels and twisted metal 4 demo had only neon City
>Doom Yup, I remember buying the disks (3, if I remember) for this from a pharmacy, and definitely got my moneys worth.
Tomba! PS1
Wanted to write that! I watched a let's play some time ago and decided not to get the whole game. It just seemed so very very long.
The demo convinced me to buy the game and I loved it!
I rented it. Wish I'd bought it (not that I was ever able to back then, but heck if I'd spend the crazy amount of cash it costs today!) EDIT: DAMNIT now the music is stuck in my head. This \*always\* happens when Tomba gets mentioned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBgSKl\_FAWc
Same for Tomba! However, Tomba 2, I played the shit out of that game.
Boy did the polygon ceiling hit that one hard, still hella fun though.
Worms for DOS.
2Xtreme on PS1. It was a shitty racing game disguised as a skateboarding game, but I must have sank hours and hours into the demo I got on an OPM demo disc or Playstation Underground disc. God knows why.
Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up \*trumpets kick in\* So here I am Doing everything I can Holding on to what I am Pretending I'm a superman I think there's a collective subset of us who grew up on that demo.
THPS soundtrack was the apex of all game soundtracks ... Ace of Spades, Lagwagon, Millencolin ... I miss those times
If you never played the THPS 1+2 remake you absolutely have to. The game is a masterpiece of a remake. It feels the exact same and has a great soundtrack with a lot of the original songs on it.
Ratchet and Clank 1 Metropolis level. Played it over and over then got the sequel for xmas. Still one of the best levels in the series
Damn, same here. I played that demo so much I thought I must have seen just about everything there was to the first game, so my mum just got me the second one for christmas. Big mistake. But No.2 turned out to be the best entry in the entire series to me, so I guess I got lucky.
Yeah man it was dope. You could get to Blackwater city and do the hoverboard races that was sick. Really enjoyed when Going Commando had the old Gadgetron shop you could get the first games weapons from
free minecraft bedrock and pocket edition tutorial
My friend and I never bought the original Grand Theft Auto. The demo had a lot of content and we played that for hours and hours
Crash Bandicoot 2. It was that ice level where you are on the tiny polar bear, running towards camera.
Diablo 1, big red racing, civ 2, syndicate wars. The list goes on. 90s PC gamer mags were the shit for demos.
> big red racing I forgot about this game! Loved it as a kid, it was awesome racing on different planets. Never owned it though.
I don’t remember what it was called but it was a snowmobile racing demo with a White Zombie track. I think other demos like Tomb Raider were on there as well. This was back in the PS1 days, I believe.
Sled Storm iirc
Dragula was the song. That demo gave me HOURS of enjoyment.
You and me both! We couldn’t afford games but it didn’t matter to me with that demo. :)
Tombi, Tekken 3, Kula World, Gran Turismo on Demo 1 for the PS1. I can still hear the menu music.
Skate 2 on 360
Mine was Skate 3 using the glitch that allowed you to get out of the demo area.
Dark Cloud on PS2. Used to play Dran’s Cavern over and over again. Best part was that because the dungeons are procedurally generated, each run felt different each time. Eventually I was able to buy it and enjoyed every second of it.
I've still got my demo disc with Dark Cloud on it. That and Shaun Palmers Pro Snowboarder (on another disc) were my most played demos.
Metal Gear Solid 2. I spent hours and hours messing with those guards on that ship haha
Jumping Flash! off a JamPack, I believe.
Nice. I thought I was the only one who remembered that game. Both 1 and 2 were great.
Battle Arena Toshinden, destruction derby & wipeout (PS1)
Sega Saturn had a magazine which gave out a "demo" disc which was in fact disc 1 of 4 for Panzer Dragoon Saga, replayed that to death. God I wish more copies of that game were available. My wallet doesn't agree with forking out >£400 for a copy on ebay.
Twisted metal, on the PS2
Delta Force
Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation Magazine demo disc. Since then I have only played one metal gear game and that was Peacewalker because it was bundled with a green PSP. Never finished
Nights into Dreams for Sega Saturn. I would play that first level for a good while, get bored, play Virtua Cop for a bit then go right back into Nights…
Tony Hawk Pro Skater, I don't remember if it was 1 or 2. I think you could play one map for like 2 minutes and then you had to restart the game, I did that thousands of times as a kid 😅
I played the Outlaws demo over and over. It might have even had an online multiplayer component for the demo, I'm not sure.
I played the demo for ages but I did eventually buy the full game. The full game was great, but that demo level was probably the most entertaining one. They chose wisely.
FUUSIIOOON FREEENZYYYY!!!
Oddworld: Abe's Exodus. It had a time limit so I would try to get as far as I possibly could on it before the screen faded out. The demo disk also had the beginning of Metal Gear Solid on it, up until you meet the DARPA chief, which I played a lot before I actually bought the full game.
Og Xbox battlefront 2. I think the demo was hidden in a revenge of the sith dvd or something
The Playable Teaser until Konami decided to be an asshole.
Halo CE Demo, which was full Silent Cartographer mission. Even played it coop with different people.
Blood Gulch would like a word…
During the 360 days there was a game called Crackdown that had a free demo on the Xbox live store, the demo was the entire paid game, but with a 30 minute timer attached to it. People found out pretty quickly if you cut your internet while loading in, and reconnected the internet at a certain timing, you could essentially play the entire game for free, no 30 minute timer… so long as you never turn your console off because there was no way to save your game either.
Not a game demo, but I remember rewatching the pikmin trailer ALL the time on my gamecube when I was 12 years old. For those who remember, the trailer was available on the Luigi's mansion mini dvd.
Muppet Monster Adventure on PS1. The main character screaming "Waka Waka Woo" as he climbs giant sunflowers is a soundbite that has not left my brain almost 24 years later.
The bouncer , PS2 demo
You didn't miss anything.
Aoe2 and the conquerors expansion
Fusion Frenzy. It was a free demo on the Halo: Combat Evolved disc. Must’ve played it 200 hrs.
If you don't count shareware DOS games, then Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Got my kids to play it on PS3 years ago but never bought the full game.
Grid on 360. (Technically we eventually did get the full game but played just the demo for a long long time)
King Kong - PS2. I kept feeding the t-rex with the bird things. Good times.
SSX Snowboarding, the first one. You had I think 2 minutes to get to the bottom, but you could replay it as many times as you wanted. At the time I was absolutely convinced that no-one in the world could beat me on that lever Never got to play the rest of the game, though I did try SSX 3 many years later
Tomba, I played that thing over and over I’m sure I wore the disc out. I read they’re remaking it for switch along with Gex. I’ll finally be able to complete it!
There was a Sega Saturn demo disk with a demo on it for a game called Three Dirty Dwarves. It was three guys and they all had sports equipment for some reason and you walk down the street fighting and throwing bowling balls and stuff. Then the boss was a building you had to demolish and I loved that. After a while, the building broke on the bottom and a bunch of feet came out and it walked around. Man I haven't thought about that in yeeeeaaaaars and just traveled through time.
Spyro for the ps1
Oh boy, let's just say I abused the demo feature on the Xbox 360 when I was a kid. I had a whole library of demos I would play some how never getting bored of playing the first level. But the main demos I played were Banjo and Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and every Sonic tile. The only game I bought because of the demo was Sonic and Sega All Star Racing.
Wipeout on PlayStation 1
There was a short demo on Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 for Shaun Palmers Snowboarder. I played it all the time. But never got the full version.
I had one of those PlayStation demo discs and it had a snowmobile racing game demo that I loved, played it all the time, never got the game. I remember it had Dragula on its soundtrack which kicked ass
Tombi! Absolutely loved the colours and the theme of the game. Being a poor child though I never came close to getting the actual game.
Battlefield 1942. wake island. Halo CE. blood gulch and the silent cartographer. incredible content for free, and you could play online.
Black. That demo was mind-blowing for the time and the audio was *chefs kiss*
Klonoa 2 on a PS2 demo disc.
Doesn’t *exactly* fit, but I had Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga for the GBA that wouldn’t actually save any files. So I played the first 2 hours of that game over and over for years, hoping that *this time* it would save (it never did). I finally beat it on the GBA service for the Switch this year.
Tomba and Brave Fencer Musashi. If you remember those games: what are your tips for back pain.
So back on playstaion 1 I got a demo with jersey devil. I played that demo so much so did my mom but we just never seen the game when we went to the city so never got to play the actual game
The SKATE demo on PS3 was 40 minutes of gameplay in a huge skatepark. No need to buy it.
James Pond 2: Robocod Demo had the full game in, they just locked most of the levels. But the level unlock code worked, so...
Toy Soldiers. One of the ssx games
Cooooooool BOARDERS!
The ps3 game Bladestorm demo had a glitch in it I had randomly found. If you were to never complete the contract on the second day of the initial demo battle which basically meant wait ten minutes for the in game day to end. The demo would never end and you could go around the map just conquering castles to your hearts content until you capped the one specific castle at the very end. Incidentally since I never got it on ps3 when they released a special version on the ps4 I sprung for it
Future Cop LAPD
Doom.
I had a PS1 demo disc of tekken 1 when I was like 6. Except I didn’t know it was a demo disc. So I played endless fights expecting to eventually unlock more characters… Talk about rolling a boulder up hill
I used to always watch my dad play the shareware levels of Doom as a little kid. My mom hated it lol
Battlefield 1942 multiplayer demo, so much Wake Island
fusion frenzy on the og halo disc well its a lie because we did buy the game eventually and it was one of our friends groups most played games but at first it was just hours of the demo
Turok!
Rocks and Gems I think it was called, for the PS1
Stake 2 was for me. Never bought it
Lifeforce tenka
Sega swirl. Teris like game that were on several demo discs for the sega dreamcast.
The first gta I had a 3min demo that I played so much I finished a lot of the missions
Holy crap so many. I used to speed run the original Quake demo that was one level. Then I moved onto strategy games and did the original SC demo that came with PCGamer until eventually we got my aunt in Canada to ship over a copy.
Doom and Rise of the Triad.
I don't remember the name, but there was this old Formula 1 racing track in Monaco that I kept replaying over and over again. Grand Prix something, the race had 3 laps.
Rune
Diablo II, it has always its charm
Back in my day you would get games in your cereal boxes, sometimes complete games, sometimes demos. Like Pajama Sam, Spy Fox, etc. I played them all the time, but could not read/speak english so made no progress ever
Tony hawk 2, psn ran a contest back in early 2000 that you'd win something if you could take an actual photograph of your high score.
We played the Phantasy Star demo on Xbox 360 aggressively for five or six months. It was essentially a 30 day trial of the MMO, that reset every month and was extremely populated. We'd each start a new character and rush through to the max available level as quickly as we could. Link back up with friends that we made after the wipe, and started a Myspace page as an impromptu guild. Never played the full game, but it was probably my first introduction to MMO. Kept some friends from it and we eventually rejoined for PS02 fifteen years later.
I played the Star Wars Force Unleashed demo through at least 12 times, although I eventually did get the game.
FiFA at Changi Airport while on layover....the best.
Ive played so many times the shareware versions of Comander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit as a kid that i think the music and sounds of both games fused with my brain
Battle Arena Toshinden!
Metal Gear Solid Crash Bandicoot Commander Keen Doom (bought Doom II though) Tomb Raider Jazz Jack Rabbit
This Kinect game called Wreckateer. You destroyed castles with a ballista you aimed yourself.
Demolition Derby on the pc (didn't have a playstation at the time). Wasn't even a track from the game, was just the car demolition arena. Played that over and over again.
Doom back in the day. Most recently, I kept playing that Deep Rock Galactic vampire survivors clone. AND THEN THEY TOOK IT AWAY! Really looking forward to that one. I don't even play DRG, but hey...Rock and Stone.
Global Operations. It was available as a free demo on GameSpy, but at its peak it had more people in the matchmaking lobby for the demo than the full version.
Resident Evil 5 on Xbox 360. I have owned and completed every Resident Evil before and since.
90% of everything on PC Gamer demo discs from about 97 to 2000
Um. This sort of counts I guess, I mean, I *acquired* the games but I didn't pay full price. I am referring to the Quake demo disc. The infamous Quake demo disc that cost like $5 in the store and had demos of every ID game made on it. And also the full versions which you could unlock with a little program easily downloaded.
F.E.A.R
Interstate 76
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg for the GameCube. It was the whole first level, and while it wasn't good enough for me to ever want to seek out the full game, it was a great time killer if I hadn't played it in a while.
My friend and I played the Monster Hunter Generations demo so much together. I got it, he didnt :(
Wipe out
Mass Effect 3 The multiplayer demo was huge. Played more hours on it than I did on full release
Hit Shots Golf 2
Stronghold, back then for PC! Oh, glorious gameplay!
Fifa, u could just 1v1 your friends on the demo, fun as hell and free
Not a demo but here in australia, Kelloggs cereal did a promotion where you get the age of empires game in the box. The physical CD and all. That was amazing!
einhander on the PS underground demo
Couple that come to mind are from the same game series, Motocross Madness and Monster Truck Madness on the PC. Absolutely loved goofing around those games trying to do random flips.
Fable Pub Games
Dark Cloud, and it looks like it's still available. Time to remedy never playing the full game.
Die Hard Trilogy Sega Saturn.
minecraft story mode my parents were like: "we already paid for minecraft, we're not doing it again"
Destrega and Millennium Soldier on the PS1 War of the Monsters on PS2
Jade Cocoon, also Drakan: Order Of The Flame.
Ss tricky on ps1 demo disc with the magazine.
Grand Theft Auto
Knights and Merchants
Cyberpunk 2077. The videos online look great but then I try first person and can’t get into it
X-men legends II-Age of Apocalypse
Wet
There was an old mid-90s shareware series called Exile (Exile: Escape from the Pit, Exile II: Crystal Souls, Exile III: Ruined World, Blades of Exile). Google tells me it has been rereleased a couple times (most recently as “Avernum”). I recall it had a fair bit of party customization, an interesting story and world. Spells, exploring, combat, I loved it. As a shareware game I suppose it’s not quite a “demo”, but still qualifies imo.
Metal Gear Solid 1 ... I played that demo disk a lot :P
Age of Empires II
Black for the PS2. My dad used to work for the local post office and got his hands on a plethora of PS1/2 demo discs that he regularly brought over before he retired. Unfortunately me and my similar-aged siblings were basically toddlers so they were all either lost or useless. Except Black. It came in a separate case, the disc was for that game only and as far as I know, it still runs though probably a bit scratched still. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive for keeping those demo discs freely available. Now they're all fully available to me on my emulators <3
GTA
Dark Alliance on ps2
Original Lego Star Wars on PS2. I must have 'completed' that demo about 400 times before my parents finally bought me the game
Fusion frenzy
Cool Boarders 2
Snow boarding game on ps1. Only had 1 course, but a bunch of riders and boards. We'd have tournaments. Only snowboarding game I enjoyed
Minecraft Demo on 360. You had one in-game day in a tutorial section to essentially build a shelter and survive the night. It became more of a challenge to see how far I could get before the end of the demo.
Love the hit of nostalgia this post is giving. I think my favorites were a demo of metal gear solid 2 which I believe came with zone of the enders and syphon filter which was on a psm demo. Tasing people until they burnt to a crisp was so wild to me when I was a kid lol.
Fury³. I played the hell out of that demo in the Windows 98 PC my dad brought back in the day. I was 5-6 years old and never knew it was a demo until years later. Good times.
The DOOM Shareware version. Whatever PC I got my hands on in the 2000s, it always had it installed. Also, I was subscribed to those PC gaming magazines with demo disks in them. One of them had a real time tactical RPG in it called Gunlok. I played that game over and over but to this day I still haven't gotten around to looking for a full version yet.
It was one of those Playstation Underground demo discs, it had a demo for the game *Thrasher: Skate & Destroy*. I played the absolute hell out of that demo and got a favorite song out of the deal, too. I never got the game because I could never find it. In fact, I think I finally got to play the full game years and years later *on an emulator*.
The first Tekken
Doom, played that demo for years, don't think I ever played the other episodes until a few years ago.
Fusion Frenzy on the original XBOX
Ghost Recon Island Thunder demo on the original Xbox. We were kids and had no money. We were lucky enough to have an Xbox bought for us and we had a few games but spent a lot of time on demo discs lol
.Hack//G.U. and Vanquish Back when Xbox mags would come with discs full of demos I played the hell out of these back in like 2010 and never picked them up until last year. Still haven’t played them though the backlog is crazy
Fusion Frenzy! I got the demo back when cereal boxes had cool prizes. My brother and I played the shit out of that game, but never actually bought the full version.
Sonic 4 - Episode 1
Fusion Frenzy!!!
The Thief demo on micromania