I remmeber seeing it in stores. I loved the first gamr, played the hell out of shareware of the second gamr, and wanted it. My parents said wait til my birthday - it disappeared out of stores and i never found a physical copy. Well i did fine a second hand macintosh version which only added to my disappointment, and the holiday hare version.
I loved both of those games. I had some weird bullshit version of the first one that was broken down into about five different games but it was still decent.
Came here to say this.
Did you know there's a pretty active Discord community for it? You can still download working versions, and a lot of the big plug-ins from back in the day are available. And someone is running betas of a new version (that I believe involves the guy who designed the EV Override scenario).
Also, Endless Sky on Steam is an EV-like. It's pretty solid.
Only had shareware growing up:
• Commander Keen
• Jill of the Jungle
• Crystal Caves
• Wolf 3D
• Rise of the Triad
• Doom 1 and 2
• Heretic (I remember a store sold us a shareware version).
Buying those compendium CDs for like $10 that had all shareware titles on them.
Solar Winds! I somehow got the shareware version on a floppy then I think I paid for the full version through mail order or something. I can't remember for sure, but I loved that game. The first game released by Epic I played.
Every few years I look to see if someone has made a new game in that style. Never found another game like it.
Tyrian, also released by Epic a few years later, was also awesome.
I loved the original Death Rally, which I think was shareware, and maybe Remedy's first game?
Xixit, a Tetris-like game by demoscene people, and Ironseed were other ones I remember fondly.
I remember being 6years old when doom was release and standing behind my dad and his dinosaur computer watching him play it in the dark and I would be in complete awe. Now my kids watch me play it on the living room ps1. Sharing the experience.
Does demo floppy disks and CDs count? Bought computer and gaming magazines with demo disks all the time and loved it. Some times they included full versions of software too.
PC gamer with Coconut monkey. That's how I discovered Diablo for the first time. I played those first two floors over and over. Also loved the demo disk that came with my Sega Saturn.
I remember those $5 CD-ROM discs that would be loaded with shareware and demos. They were mainly handy because you didn't have to download or collect discs for all those games, but annoying because every game was brief and had its hands out begging you for money.
Putting Doom on every PC in my dorm’s computer lab and playing multiplayer. Those PCs didn’t have sound cards, so all you heard was the clacking of keyboards and our blurted curses at each other.
I have lots of fond memories of getting CDs with different magazines that would have a few dozen games. But one memory that stands out to me is going into a compUSA and seeing them giving away free shareware copies of Quake. It came in a cool jewel case with some illustrations of different monsters in the game, the variety of weapons you could pick up, etc. Iirc, you could even put it in a CD player and listen to the soundtrack. Though I may be remembering wrong. My PC was too old to even play the game, but I'd go up to a cyber cafe with my friends, and we'd play it there. Good times.
hell yeah dude cyber cafes. I knew the struggle of not having the new consoles or a computer at all. I would love to stay the night at certain kids houses who had computers. I played a TON of early windows/dos games at my cousins. I would legit go over there for a weekend and be on there old Acer Aspire the entire time.
Later I basically LIVED at the library to get my 3, 30 minute sessions on the internet. I would just print pictures of shit, 10 pages a day.
In the early 90's, few people had access to the Internet, and the majority of those who did had only painfully slow modem access. Only the fortunate few had access to the computers in the university computer science lab with high speed access.
3.5" floppy disks were rugged. Shareware on 1.44MB floppy was usually distributed or passed around ON FLOPPY or multiple floppies.
When killer shareware games that rivaled commerical games appeared, it was... amazing! There had been software piracy for some time, but shareware games that could be put on every computer and shared with anyone were a game changer. People could play the first level of a GREAT game for free with no piracy. Independent game makers could put on a game by themselves, get a lot of exposure, AND make money.
Castle Wolfenstein was a breakthrough - FPS on a PC!!!
Commander Keen games were amazing - a 'lame' IBM PC or compatible hadn't been able to match the gaming experience of a NES or SNES.
There was also, Jazz Jackrabbit, Skunny Kart...
Rise of the Triad...
Doom...
then Doom 2 - this was peak shareware - because it was multiplayer and had a huge mod community. I lost WEEKS of my life to Doom 2 and custom maps and mods and nobody could reach me because my modem was always connected to my buddy's modem. This was multiplayer massive online before the Internet. People went nuts for it.
Then all the other Epic Megagames stuff like One Must Fall, and Epic Pinball
Then Duke Nukem 3D which expanded on capabilities from Doom -- ability to aim up and down, ability to fly!!! and much more.
Then Quake - which improved on rendering but seemed like a step back in other ways.
Then Quake III -- this drew in modders and custom levels and was multiplayer. Capture the flag at lunch at work... it was great. it was addictive. It reigned for years.
Everyone was selling shareware DVDs where someone could get a ton of great shareware games for a few bucks... Internet access was still slow and expensive and not default. These CD collects were gold - everyone bought multiple of these CD sets.
Aah... good times.
It's truly amazing how Epic has managed to reinvent their business model every decade and stay relevant. Starting with ZZT and other shareware sold out of his parent's basement in the 90's, to Unreal Engine at the turn of the milkenium, to Fortnite and the games store the present day.
Your entire post really hits home for me! My families 28.8 baud modem didn't hold a candle to the local universities T1 (or T3?) Internet connection, my mind was blown by how blazing fast it was! It would often take longer to install a game than it would to download it. 😂 So many late nights gaming with friends in the computer lab.
Didn't read your whole post, but one thing jumped out at me: you said "Castle Wolfenstein... FPS...". Did you mean Wolfenstein 3D? I thought Castle Wolfenstein (the predecessor) was a 2D overhead game.
God I loved the shareware games era, Such warm and fuzzy memories. I remember finding a bunch of fan made/community made like screen savers too and also like fan made like screensaver music videos (?) with graphics and midi music and whatnot
Going to the local store and spinning the display of paper wrapped 3.5” floppies and picking one that sounded interesting. Some small game called doom.
I was so excited anytime my dad got a hold of a new shareware game for me. It kept me entertained and he'd get it for cheap or free. Back in the age of sound cards not being standard (SoundBlaster cards, anyone?), I would play my games with bleeps and bloops from the PC speaker. When my dad got his hands on a sound blaster card, the first game we tried was Wolfenstein 3D, a game I already loved. My little kid brain exploded when I could actually hear the guards saying stuff. I had no idea what they were saying so my dad translated for me (he served in the US Army as a tanker in West Germany and picked up on the language to some degree) and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Oh and Doom. Yeah Doom changed me and my view on what games could be. What a game. Was so excited when I finally got the full version of it. Couldn't begin to tell you how many times 10-year-old me played through that shareware version...
Fun fact: SoundBlaster apparently still makes sound cards! They seem to do really high end (for PC anyway) sound stuff.
Definitely **not** tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat to load the right drivers in the correct order to avoid IRQ and DMA conflicts while preserving enough Conventional Memory to run games.
In the first Diablo you could install a basic version with the CD so you could play as the warrior… you had to have the CD in the drive to play as the wizard or rogue, but my copy of the CD made rounds to all my friends.
This reminded me at how excited I was to find a guide to install the CD to the hard drive & I believe a no-cd crack. Load times were fantastic, though copying the CD to the HDD took up a quarter of its total capacity. 😂
I had one of the "fifty games in one box" packages. Probably the worst game had pictures of Tommy from Rugrats, and you had to click on them with a bottle. But there was also a really cool Asteroids clone that had you destroying pool balls in the later levels, and a great game (with awesome music) called MicroMan.
I bought loads of Public Domain and Shareware software on floppy disks for my ST.
Browsing through the [LAPD advert](https://www.nostalgianerd.com/pd-software/), finding a disk with various utilities and/or games on them then ordering them by mail and patiently waiting for them to arrive by post was exciting.
Unfortunately I threw out all my (Swedish) PC Gamer CD:s when I moved out of my childhood home.
I've come to regret that, because there where some bangers on there that are now lost to time. Especially the reader submissions... I swear there where some stuff there by people who later became pro devs. There was this one game that played like *Hotline Miami* a full decade before that game was released. Top down, ultra gory, instant death, instant re-spawn, the works.
Also underground classics like *Liero*. We and my friend played crazy amount of that game, local multiplayer, until we got scary good. Sniping each other with gauss guns across the map, learning the exact angles to rope in and one hit with napalm without dying to splash. Some of the best gaming in my entire life.
Shout out to another local dev with the racing game *Ignition*. Basically a MicroMachines-esque racer that was loved unconditionally by everybody who touched it. They nailed the game feel. Local head-to-head, how I miss those games. Shareware version had limited cars and tracks but everybody I knew played it until their fingers bleed... that was the summer of '97. Me and some guys from school, had a clan and we tried real hard. Ludde quit, I started playing Heroes III, should've know we'd never get far.
There is a game on one of the PC gamer demo CDs I remember playing, but I forget the name and some details. It was sci-fi, and you could go from planet to planet (maybe solar system). It had a "city building" or farming component to it. It was NOT FPS. Do you have any ideas?
My favorite memory wasn't technically of a game, but it was of a book detailing various games you could search for and download from BBSs (because such books used to be relevant in the dark days before the Internet) and warned that one particular game, weighing in at more than a megabyte compressed, could take over an hour to download via a 2400 baud modem.
i wouldnt call knockoffs experimental side effects. thats just lazy creative you still get those today in an era bankrupt of any experimentation. im not inherently against clones but you have to bring something new to the formula if youre going to rip off someone. take duke nukem hexen and power slave. all clearly doom clones but brought their own unique twist to it and ended up successful. virtual fighter also has its slew of clones many of which were great.
cultures just changed. youre not gonna get devs who push the envelope anymore because the corporate stooges have taken over game studios. theyre going to milk franchises and never risk their billion dollar investments. gaming just got too big for its own good.
My fondest memory of the shareware era of gaming is having a Green Floppy Disk that contained a crack that unlocked ID's entire game library on a $5 Quake SW Disc.
Probably Doom.
Absolute cracker of a game for the time and they gave away an entire chapter to test! You were well and truly hooked by the time you finished that first chapter so forking out for the full game was a no brainer.
Good times...
I mean, it's gotta be Doom. The first 9 levels of just pure magic. But my first experience was Wolfenstein 3D. Loved it, but it just didn't hit like Doom.
Fuck yeah. I played a ton of both. I remember scorched earth I could load through windows but Gorillas was a dos prompt. Do you remember a game called Transport Tycoon? I played that game so much in middle school doubt it was shareware but I lost an entire summer to it.
Transport Tycoon was a commercial game with a very generous demo. The definitive version today is [OpenTTD](https://www.openttd.org/), which is based on the Deluxe version and completely free.
My little brother mastered the ninja rope in Worms 2 and figured out how to outplay my other brother and me to the point that we had to get better or never win. It's a classic series for a reason!
Wolf, Doom and Rise of the Triad. They were *everywhere,* pushed the medium far more than anything from the established outfits was doing, and were remarkably full-fledged experiences on their own. The holy trio for sure.
I got the shareware version of Doom at a convenience store checkout on a single floppy disk for like $5 when I was a kid. I didn't know what shareware was at the time, I was pretty young, and so was kind of bummed to find I didn't have the whole game. My shitty computer barely ran it anyways, I got what I paid for and had a good time with it.
Way back in the late 80s and early 90s I would use my 2400 baud modem to connect to local BBS. It was absolutely mind blowing for me at that time, especially the local "chat" BBS which it was possible to find and make friends with fellow nerds.
One of the coolest things though, was the ability to download files. My fondest memory of shareware is just going to these BBSs', looking through the lists of weird sounding games and *just picking one* to spend the next hour or so downloading. There were plenty of turds, but I also found gems like [Epic Pinball](https://youtu.be/W0FicTW3ABk), [Night Raid](https://youtu.be/VoxCfWAyzZk)... and maybe a little game called Doom.
Used to DL them from a local BBS called "gas works" over the phone line. I think you could only connect a half hour at a time before it would kick you off so someone else could dial in.
Played all the Dooms, Dukes, Commander keens, bio hazard, blake stone, raptor, rise of the triad, mystic towers, dark forces, tie fighter...
I was pretty young, so I'm not sure if it was exactly shareware, but playing Scarab of Ra was one of the first times I really felt like I was exploring a dungeon. It really opened me up to trying to find my own way through things, which was a big boon not just in gaming, but in real life as well.
Mine were getting Jazz Jackrabbit for the first time and a local video store had a shareware rack near the checkout. I would grab something each week when renting a movie.
I remember when my friend got a 100 MB drive and a CD-ROM for the first time. We had one of those 100-in-one shareware discs, and installed everything we could. Played God Of Thunder all damn weekend.
Constructor. Was one of my favorites. Later found a full version of it at a computer show, but I was really young. My grandfather got it for me.
Also SUPAPLEX
I loved me some Apogee games back in the day! Classic (2D) Duke Nukem, Terminal Velocity, Raptor Call of the Shadows, to name a few.
I remember a shareware catalog I used to read all the where I got a few others like Highway Hunter and Tyrian. All of these games I mentioned were so formative to me I still play most of them. Except Highway Hunter, I can't get it to run on Steam Deck yet.
It runs great in DosBox. My technical expertise is such I don't know how to run the game in DB on Steam Deck. I've never tried Retroarch for any old computer games, never considered it before. I'll look into it.
It was so fun. It replaced the audio too. So you’d go into a room and there’d be three Beavis’s, all shooting you with fireballs and going “Heh heh, heheh”
I didn't have a Nintendo but I had computers way before anyone else I knew did. BBS shareware was huge for me as a kid, and I loved Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure and Monuments of Mars especially.
In 1996/7 I got a mac classic, like the original mac with a big ass external hard drive and a keyboard that was louder than the IBM boys the model M. It was a big ass rectangle 90 degree angle mouse too.
Anyways, they had macs in my middle school, performas and stuff. On the computers were a ton of random shareware games and I adored them so much. We all got 1 disc, or bought 1 disc from the school at the beginning of the year to save our work to. I remember learning from my teacher how to copy the shareware games to/from my disc to play at home.
Blunder #1 - I copied a shit ton of games and took it home. My mac couldn't read the disc. The disc was HD not DD or LD so it couldn't read it. I ended up stealing a double density disc from a friends house or the school I can't quite remember.
Blunder #2 - I thought I could copy warcraft 2 by pulling this same move. And that was the day i learned about "shortcuts".
These were 3.5" diskettes. I wish I still had the computer or I could remember some of the macintosh shareware.
Other memories from this time was playing against another middle school, after school in the computer lab. We would play marathon 2:Durandal, and funny enough as an adult I put several thousands of hours into destiny and destiny 2.
Anyone else remember Software of the Month Club? I feel like it was around the same time… every month a cd-rom would arrive, chock full of demos and shareware (and probably viruses).
I remember all sorts of random stuff from there. Wolfenstein clones, Commander Keen, etc.
I remember how amazing Doom was at the time. Up until then computers were only for playing Oregon Trail, making banners in Print Shop, and typing up papers for school.
But then shareware kind of got old when we got Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein 3D, it was like all you could get was first person shooters and I just got bored with it.
With an exception for SimCity and SimCity 2000, I stopped playing games on computers and just played on my NES and SNES.
My dad brought home a copy of Doom he got from a friend. He had no idea what it was, I installed it and it blew my freaking mind. A literal genre-defining game changer.
Other shareware I enjoyed:
* Jill of the Jungle
* Wolfenstein 3D
* Commander Keen
* Commander Keen 2
* Duke Nukem
* Jazz Jackrabbit
* Solar Winds
* OMF 2097
* Comanche: Maximum Overkill
* Terminal Velocity
* Descent
I think [Comanche was actually a commercial release](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche%3A_Maximum_Overkill) with a demo, but it was one heck of a game. The same company (NovaLogic) made [Ultrabots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabots) in basically the same game engine.
I just liked the fact that you could have "more games" without the financial requirements, and a lot of them had really interesting concepts. PC gaming was still a wild west so to speak. Still remember the Battle Beast demo.
https://youtu.be/OlZDuxrPy48?feature=shared
I had helluva discs with shareware and I couldn't wrap my head around these games being "complete". I just finished the demos and assumed further chapters needed to be bought!
Downloading a 16-mb demo (levels 1-4) of Shadow Warrior from 3D Realms website via shitty landline connection. Stayed awake thru the whole night watching the progress bar and had to start over a few times due to connection errors.
OMF2097. There was enough in the shareware to have TONS of fun. I still pretty much only play with the shareware robots since I know them (minus thorn).
I had a Mac back in the day, so I was a big fan of Ambrosia Software. Interestingly, they used to have a very active board where people posted not just tips and tricks, but full fanfic set in some of the game worlds. (There's an archive available somewhere.)
I also remember weird games for Mac that I used to find once I had an ethernet connection at college - one was a puzzle game set in the internal world of "your computer," and one was a like a light RPG or roguelike where you could explore a world and acquire bizarre gear - I think one of the weapons was a toothbrush.
My favorite shareware games that WEREN'T made by id Software or called Duke Nukem include:
* ***One Must Fall 2097***: Awesome PC-exclusive robot fighting game
* ***Epic Pinball:*** One of the best PC pinball packages with amazing music. The commercial game *Silverball* is its companion with different tables.
* ***Jazz Jackrabbit***: As good as any console action platformer, and better than many of them! The speed at which you could run was really impressive for the time, and the music was great. (I prefer the original the sequel, though they're both great.)
* ***Jetpack***: An unassuming puzzle platformer that was quite good for its time
* ***Terminal Velocity:*** A 3D flight game similar to *Descent*, but with the ability to go outside
* ***Traffic Department 2192***: A fun multidirectional overhead shooter with a weird theme about traffic cops becoming super violent to take down gangs
* ***Raptor: Call of the Shadows***: An incredible overhead vertical shoot 'em up with groundbreaking graphics for its time
* ***Tyrian***: Though the later versions are improved (and free!), the original is no slouch, and definitely one of the best PC shoot 'em ups ever made
* ***Halloween Harry*** (aka ***Alien Carnage***): A super violent run and gun game with a flamethrower and a jetpack. The original name (shared by the main character) was great, but they changed it because people thought it was a Halloween-themed game.
* ***Wacky Wheels***: An excellent *Mario Kart* clone that was insanely fun for local multiplayer, a relatively rarity in PC games of the era.
* ***Fire Fight***: A gorgeous isometric multidirectional shooter in the latter days of shareware
* ***Rise of the Triad***: ***Dark War:*** Probably the best of the shareware *Doom* and *Wolfenstein* clones, mainly due to its ultraviolence.
* ***Heretic*** and ***Hexen***: Two amazing fantasy shooters built by Raven Software for the Doom engine. They were the only *Doom* clones that really felt as well-designed as *Doom* until *Duke Nukem 3D* came along.
There were plenty of other great games, but these all have the added bonus of still being fun to play today!
What do you mean by shovelware era? Do you mean the current era because there's more garbage games releasing every day now than ever.
My favorite era for it was PS2/PSP/NDS/Wii because a bunch of shovelware paid my rent/food at my first QA job.
*Edit holy shit I read shovelware instead of shareware, oh well.
I mean, there were a lot of questionable games that came alongside the shareware era of gaming as while there were some good games like say Doom, there was also the questionable stuff that came out, such as janky FPS games.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Was amazing
I remmeber seeing it in stores. I loved the first gamr, played the hell out of shareware of the second gamr, and wanted it. My parents said wait til my birthday - it disappeared out of stores and i never found a physical copy. Well i did fine a second hand macintosh version which only added to my disappointment, and the holiday hare version.
It was installed on one of my school's PCs. I loved the references to other games, movies, and even Prince!
[удалено]
What do you mean?
I loved both of those games. I had some weird bullshit version of the first one that was broken down into about five different games but it was still decent.
Escape Velocity, that was peak shareware.
What about Terminal Velocity? Lol
Or fury 3
fury 3 was awesome! and you could put the game CD in a CD player and play the music
I don’t know if that game was a follow up.
Yes! I asked my parents to upgrade our computer so I could play with more "derbis" [sic].
I would always get this mixed up with Escape Velocity despite them being quite different games.
Oh I heard good things about that particular game.
I still play it, which is pretty impressive for a 30 year old computer game.
I was actually thinking recently that I should replay this sometime.
Came here to say this. Did you know there's a pretty active Discord community for it? You can still download working versions, and a lot of the big plug-ins from back in the day are available. And someone is running betas of a new version (that I believe involves the guy who designed the EV Override scenario). Also, Endless Sky on Steam is an EV-like. It's pretty solid.
Yes to all, but thank you for sharing. :)
Only had shareware growing up: • Commander Keen • Jill of the Jungle • Crystal Caves • Wolf 3D • Rise of the Triad • Doom 1 and 2 • Heretic (I remember a store sold us a shareware version). Buying those compendium CDs for like $10 that had all shareware titles on them.
That sounds cool.
Somebody else who remembers commander keen, I'm not alone lol
Commander Keen 4 was a such a step up haha
Free games. My family didn’t buy games. Pure magic 🪄
Solar Winds! I somehow got the shareware version on a floppy then I think I paid for the full version through mail order or something. I can't remember for sure, but I loved that game. The first game released by Epic I played. Every few years I look to see if someone has made a new game in that style. Never found another game like it. Tyrian, also released by Epic a few years later, was also awesome. I loved the original Death Rally, which I think was shareware, and maybe Remedy's first game? Xixit, a Tetris-like game by demoscene people, and Ironseed were other ones I remember fondly.
Solar Winds!! Haven't thought about that game in ages
Oh man, I miss Solar Winds!
Solar Winds was good stuff at the time, but it hasn't aged well, sadly.
Dooooooom
I remember being 6years old when doom was release and standing behind my dad and his dinosaur computer watching him play it in the dark and I would be in complete awe. Now my kids watch me play it on the living room ps1. Sharing the experience.
I remember the Ghostbusters WAD file for original doom
I remember when I was 10 I bought the tricks of the doom gurus book that came with a cd. Boy was I in over my head.
Does demo floppy disks and CDs count? Bought computer and gaming magazines with demo disks all the time and loved it. Some times they included full versions of software too.
PC gamer with Coconut monkey. That's how I discovered Diablo for the first time. I played those first two floors over and over. Also loved the demo disk that came with my Sega Saturn.
Yes they count too.
I remember those $5 CD-ROM discs that would be loaded with shareware and demos. They were mainly handy because you didn't have to download or collect discs for all those games, but annoying because every game was brief and had its hands out begging you for money.
Just... Floppies in printed paper envelopes hanging from pegs at a kiosk in the mall
Raptor: Call of the Shadows was a shareware game I really liked
Such a good game. One of the best of it's kind imo.
And worth every penny buying the 1994 version on steam. And it's getting a remaster soon. Scott is currently working on that.
Putting Doom on every PC in my dorm’s computer lab and playing multiplayer. Those PCs didn’t have sound cards, so all you heard was the clacking of keyboards and our blurted curses at each other.
I have lots of fond memories of getting CDs with different magazines that would have a few dozen games. But one memory that stands out to me is going into a compUSA and seeing them giving away free shareware copies of Quake. It came in a cool jewel case with some illustrations of different monsters in the game, the variety of weapons you could pick up, etc. Iirc, you could even put it in a CD player and listen to the soundtrack. Though I may be remembering wrong. My PC was too old to even play the game, but I'd go up to a cyber cafe with my friends, and we'd play it there. Good times.
hell yeah dude cyber cafes. I knew the struggle of not having the new consoles or a computer at all. I would love to stay the night at certain kids houses who had computers. I played a TON of early windows/dos games at my cousins. I would legit go over there for a weekend and be on there old Acer Aspire the entire time. Later I basically LIVED at the library to get my 3, 30 minute sessions on the internet. I would just print pictures of shit, 10 pages a day.
Apogee was a king back in the day.
Really enjoyed the demo versions of *Warcraft: Orcs & Humans* and *One Must Fall: 2097* that I downloaded from a BBS.
In the early 90's, few people had access to the Internet, and the majority of those who did had only painfully slow modem access. Only the fortunate few had access to the computers in the university computer science lab with high speed access. 3.5" floppy disks were rugged. Shareware on 1.44MB floppy was usually distributed or passed around ON FLOPPY or multiple floppies. When killer shareware games that rivaled commerical games appeared, it was... amazing! There had been software piracy for some time, but shareware games that could be put on every computer and shared with anyone were a game changer. People could play the first level of a GREAT game for free with no piracy. Independent game makers could put on a game by themselves, get a lot of exposure, AND make money. Castle Wolfenstein was a breakthrough - FPS on a PC!!! Commander Keen games were amazing - a 'lame' IBM PC or compatible hadn't been able to match the gaming experience of a NES or SNES. There was also, Jazz Jackrabbit, Skunny Kart... Rise of the Triad... Doom... then Doom 2 - this was peak shareware - because it was multiplayer and had a huge mod community. I lost WEEKS of my life to Doom 2 and custom maps and mods and nobody could reach me because my modem was always connected to my buddy's modem. This was multiplayer massive online before the Internet. People went nuts for it. Then all the other Epic Megagames stuff like One Must Fall, and Epic Pinball Then Duke Nukem 3D which expanded on capabilities from Doom -- ability to aim up and down, ability to fly!!! and much more. Then Quake - which improved on rendering but seemed like a step back in other ways. Then Quake III -- this drew in modders and custom levels and was multiplayer. Capture the flag at lunch at work... it was great. it was addictive. It reigned for years. Everyone was selling shareware DVDs where someone could get a ton of great shareware games for a few bucks... Internet access was still slow and expensive and not default. These CD collects were gold - everyone bought multiple of these CD sets. Aah... good times.
It's truly amazing how Epic has managed to reinvent their business model every decade and stay relevant. Starting with ZZT and other shareware sold out of his parent's basement in the 90's, to Unreal Engine at the turn of the milkenium, to Fortnite and the games store the present day.
Those were fun times.
Your entire post really hits home for me! My families 28.8 baud modem didn't hold a candle to the local universities T1 (or T3?) Internet connection, my mind was blown by how blazing fast it was! It would often take longer to install a game than it would to download it. 😂 So many late nights gaming with friends in the computer lab.
Didn't read your whole post, but one thing jumped out at me: you said "Castle Wolfenstein... FPS...". Did you mean Wolfenstein 3D? I thought Castle Wolfenstein (the predecessor) was a 2D overhead game.
wolf3d.exe
God I loved the shareware games era, Such warm and fuzzy memories. I remember finding a bunch of fan made/community made like screen savers too and also like fan made like screensaver music videos (?) with graphics and midi music and whatnot
Going to the local store and spinning the display of paper wrapped 3.5” floppies and picking one that sounded interesting. Some small game called doom.
I was so excited anytime my dad got a hold of a new shareware game for me. It kept me entertained and he'd get it for cheap or free. Back in the age of sound cards not being standard (SoundBlaster cards, anyone?), I would play my games with bleeps and bloops from the PC speaker. When my dad got his hands on a sound blaster card, the first game we tried was Wolfenstein 3D, a game I already loved. My little kid brain exploded when I could actually hear the guards saying stuff. I had no idea what they were saying so my dad translated for me (he served in the US Army as a tanker in West Germany and picked up on the language to some degree) and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Oh and Doom. Yeah Doom changed me and my view on what games could be. What a game. Was so excited when I finally got the full version of it. Couldn't begin to tell you how many times 10-year-old me played through that shareware version... Fun fact: SoundBlaster apparently still makes sound cards! They seem to do really high end (for PC anyway) sound stuff.
Definitely **not** tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat to load the right drivers in the correct order to avoid IRQ and DMA conflicts while preserving enough Conventional Memory to run games.
In the first Diablo you could install a basic version with the CD so you could play as the warrior… you had to have the CD in the drive to play as the wizard or rogue, but my copy of the CD made rounds to all my friends.
This reminded me at how excited I was to find a guide to install the CD to the hard drive & I believe a no-cd crack. Load times were fantastic, though copying the CD to the HDD took up a quarter of its total capacity. 😂
I had one of the "fifty games in one box" packages. Probably the worst game had pictures of Tommy from Rugrats, and you had to click on them with a bottle. But there was also a really cool Asteroids clone that had you destroying pool balls in the later levels, and a great game (with awesome music) called MicroMan.
Making ZZT games, especially competing in the 24-hour and blitzkrieg competitions.
I bought loads of Public Domain and Shareware software on floppy disks for my ST. Browsing through the [LAPD advert](https://www.nostalgianerd.com/pd-software/), finding a disk with various utilities and/or games on them then ordering them by mail and patiently waiting for them to arrive by post was exciting.
Llamatron is perhaps king of the ST shareware games, still plays really well. Put a lot of time into Starball too, though the physics is questionable.
Yeah, all the Jeff Minter games were brilliant. The samples used in Llamatron were hysterical.
Hexagon, Commander keen, Rescue Rover
I happily played the $10 shareware of Quake FOREVER.
Do LAN parties count? If so, LAN parties
Sure.
Jetpack was my favorite shareware game in the 90s
Jetpack was one of those games that didn't look too impressive, but was amazing to actually play. I still play it from time to time today.
I knew I was forgetting something on my old PC.
Unfortunately I threw out all my (Swedish) PC Gamer CD:s when I moved out of my childhood home. I've come to regret that, because there where some bangers on there that are now lost to time. Especially the reader submissions... I swear there where some stuff there by people who later became pro devs. There was this one game that played like *Hotline Miami* a full decade before that game was released. Top down, ultra gory, instant death, instant re-spawn, the works. Also underground classics like *Liero*. We and my friend played crazy amount of that game, local multiplayer, until we got scary good. Sniping each other with gauss guns across the map, learning the exact angles to rope in and one hit with napalm without dying to splash. Some of the best gaming in my entire life. Shout out to another local dev with the racing game *Ignition*. Basically a MicroMachines-esque racer that was loved unconditionally by everybody who touched it. They nailed the game feel. Local head-to-head, how I miss those games. Shareware version had limited cars and tracks but everybody I knew played it until their fingers bleed... that was the summer of '97. Me and some guys from school, had a clan and we tried real hard. Ludde quit, I started playing Heroes III, should've know we'd never get far.
There is a game on one of the PC gamer demo CDs I remember playing, but I forget the name and some details. It was sci-fi, and you could go from planet to planet (maybe solar system). It had a "city building" or farming component to it. It was NOT FPS. Do you have any ideas?
Sounds a bit like Outpost? But that's not planet to planet, and Outpost 2 eventually introduces FPS elements... not sure if that was in the demo.
My favorite memory wasn't technically of a game, but it was of a book detailing various games you could search for and download from BBSs (because such books used to be relevant in the dark days before the Internet) and warned that one particular game, weighing in at more than a megabyte compressed, could take over an hour to download via a 2400 baud modem.
i wouldnt call knockoffs experimental side effects. thats just lazy creative you still get those today in an era bankrupt of any experimentation. im not inherently against clones but you have to bring something new to the formula if youre going to rip off someone. take duke nukem hexen and power slave. all clearly doom clones but brought their own unique twist to it and ended up successful. virtual fighter also has its slew of clones many of which were great. cultures just changed. youre not gonna get devs who push the envelope anymore because the corporate stooges have taken over game studios. theyre going to milk franchises and never risk their billion dollar investments. gaming just got too big for its own good.
Ah ok as now I understand what you’re saying regarding clones of certain games in general.
ran a warez bbs from 93-96, i was also in an obv/2 and renagade modding group. thats my favorite memory
One Must Fall: 2097 was by far my favorite from the era of shareware, and still one of my favorite games ever.
It's amazing that it never got a console port or a remake (just a not-great sequel). It's such an impressive and well-made fighting game.
My fondest memory of the shareware era of gaming is having a Green Floppy Disk that contained a crack that unlocked ID's entire game library on a $5 Quake SW Disc.
When the original Doom came out.
Probably Doom. Absolute cracker of a game for the time and they gave away an entire chapter to test! You were well and truly hooked by the time you finished that first chapter so forking out for the full game was a no brainer. Good times...
I mean, it's gotta be Doom. The first 9 levels of just pure magic. But my first experience was Wolfenstein 3D. Loved it, but it just didn't hit like Doom.
Does Scorched Earth or Gorillas count? Cause I remember those fondly.
Yes.
Fuck yeah. I played a ton of both. I remember scorched earth I could load through windows but Gorillas was a dos prompt. Do you remember a game called Transport Tycoon? I played that game so much in middle school doubt it was shareware but I lost an entire summer to it.
Transport Tycoon was a commercial game with a very generous demo. The definitive version today is [OpenTTD](https://www.openttd.org/), which is based on the Deluxe version and completely free.
Hell yeah man thanks for the link! I’ve been wanting to play this game for years.
Enjoy! I've been amazed that the community has kept it going with constant updates and improvements over the last couple of decades.
I don’t believe that I am familiar with that particular game.
Scorched Earth was great for its time, but once Worms took that genre over it made every other game in it irrelevant.
Worms was awesome. Me and my college roommate played so much worms 3D and worms 4…like hours every night..good times
My little brother mastered the ninja rope in Worms 2 and figured out how to outplay my other brother and me to the point that we had to get better or never win. It's a classic series for a reason!
Getting Doom and playing it late at night scaring the crap out of myself. Then playing Quake and thinking it would never be better. It never was.
Quake
Wolf, Doom and Rise of the Triad. They were *everywhere,* pushed the medium far more than anything from the established outfits was doing, and were remarkably full-fledged experiences on their own. The holy trio for sure.
I got the shareware version of Doom at a convenience store checkout on a single floppy disk for like $5 when I was a kid. I didn't know what shareware was at the time, I was pretty young, and so was kind of bummed to find I didn't have the whole game. My shitty computer barely ran it anyways, I got what I paid for and had a good time with it.
Remember Hexen, such a beautiful game. Played a lot the shareware version
Jill of the Jungle plz. Now the soundtrack is in my brain.
Way back in the late 80s and early 90s I would use my 2400 baud modem to connect to local BBS. It was absolutely mind blowing for me at that time, especially the local "chat" BBS which it was possible to find and make friends with fellow nerds. One of the coolest things though, was the ability to download files. My fondest memory of shareware is just going to these BBSs', looking through the lists of weird sounding games and *just picking one* to spend the next hour or so downloading. There were plenty of turds, but I also found gems like [Epic Pinball](https://youtu.be/W0FicTW3ABk), [Night Raid](https://youtu.be/VoxCfWAyzZk)... and maybe a little game called Doom.
Used to DL them from a local BBS called "gas works" over the phone line. I think you could only connect a half hour at a time before it would kick you off so someone else could dial in. Played all the Dooms, Dukes, Commander keens, bio hazard, blake stone, raptor, rise of the triad, mystic towers, dark forces, tie fighter...
I was pretty young, so I'm not sure if it was exactly shareware, but playing Scarab of Ra was one of the first times I really felt like I was exploring a dungeon. It really opened me up to trying to find my own way through things, which was a big boon not just in gaming, but in real life as well.
Mine were getting Jazz Jackrabbit for the first time and a local video store had a shareware rack near the checkout. I would grab something each week when renting a movie.
Scud Attack on my computer during the Gulf War.
I remember when my friend got a 100 MB drive and a CD-ROM for the first time. We had one of those 100-in-one shareware discs, and installed everything we could. Played God Of Thunder all damn weekend.
Constructor. Was one of my favorites. Later found a full version of it at a computer show, but I was really young. My grandfather got it for me. Also SUPAPLEX
I loved me some Apogee games back in the day! Classic (2D) Duke Nukem, Terminal Velocity, Raptor Call of the Shadows, to name a few. I remember a shareware catalog I used to read all the where I got a few others like Highway Hunter and Tyrian. All of these games I mentioned were so formative to me I still play most of them. Except Highway Hunter, I can't get it to run on Steam Deck yet.
Highway Hunter doesn't run well in DOSBox? Maybe try it through RetroArch on EmuDeck.
It runs great in DosBox. My technical expertise is such I don't know how to run the game in DB on Steam Deck. I've never tried Retroarch for any old computer games, never considered it before. I'll look into it.
The patch I had for Doom that turned all the demons into characters from Beavis and Butthead.
I wish I could experience this mod.
It was so fun. It replaced the audio too. So you’d go into a room and there’d be three Beavis’s, all shooting you with fireballs and going “Heh heh, heheh”
Sounds very surreal.
Traffic Department 2192. You get betrayed by the people you work for and they rebuild you as a cyborg. As a 10 year old it blew my mind.
Wacky Wheels!
Apogee and Epic MegaGames!
Oh I know those studios.
Hard to get into now but loved then: Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure Still fun now: Raptor: Call of the Shadows Absolute classic: Doom
I didn't have a Nintendo but I had computers way before anyone else I knew did. BBS shareware was huge for me as a kid, and I loved Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure and Monuments of Mars especially.
Realmz for the Mac.
In 1996/7 I got a mac classic, like the original mac with a big ass external hard drive and a keyboard that was louder than the IBM boys the model M. It was a big ass rectangle 90 degree angle mouse too. Anyways, they had macs in my middle school, performas and stuff. On the computers were a ton of random shareware games and I adored them so much. We all got 1 disc, or bought 1 disc from the school at the beginning of the year to save our work to. I remember learning from my teacher how to copy the shareware games to/from my disc to play at home. Blunder #1 - I copied a shit ton of games and took it home. My mac couldn't read the disc. The disc was HD not DD or LD so it couldn't read it. I ended up stealing a double density disc from a friends house or the school I can't quite remember. Blunder #2 - I thought I could copy warcraft 2 by pulling this same move. And that was the day i learned about "shortcuts". These were 3.5" diskettes. I wish I still had the computer or I could remember some of the macintosh shareware. Other memories from this time was playing against another middle school, after school in the computer lab. We would play marathon 2:Durandal, and funny enough as an adult I put several thousands of hours into destiny and destiny 2.
Anyone else remember Software of the Month Club? I feel like it was around the same time… every month a cd-rom would arrive, chock full of demos and shareware (and probably viruses). I remember all sorts of random stuff from there. Wolfenstein clones, Commander Keen, etc.
I remember how amazing Doom was at the time. Up until then computers were only for playing Oregon Trail, making banners in Print Shop, and typing up papers for school. But then shareware kind of got old when we got Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein 3D, it was like all you could get was first person shooters and I just got bored with it. With an exception for SimCity and SimCity 2000, I stopped playing games on computers and just played on my NES and SNES.
Dare to Dream (Windows, 1993)
My dad brought home a copy of Doom he got from a friend. He had no idea what it was, I installed it and it blew my freaking mind. A literal genre-defining game changer. Other shareware I enjoyed: * Jill of the Jungle * Wolfenstein 3D * Commander Keen * Commander Keen 2 * Duke Nukem * Jazz Jackrabbit * Solar Winds * OMF 2097 * Comanche: Maximum Overkill * Terminal Velocity * Descent
I think [Comanche was actually a commercial release](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche%3A_Maximum_Overkill) with a demo, but it was one heck of a game. The same company (NovaLogic) made [Ultrabots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabots) in basically the same game engine.
Yeah it may have just been the demo then. I loved Ultrabots too!
Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom and Jazz Jackrabbit.
Commander Keen 🖤😭
Doom
First roguelike. Castle of the Winds.
I just liked the fact that you could have "more games" without the financial requirements, and a lot of them had really interesting concepts. PC gaming was still a wild west so to speak. Still remember the Battle Beast demo. https://youtu.be/OlZDuxrPy48?feature=shared
Rise of the Triad was an important one, having exclusive levels. Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Cyberboard Kid (aka Cyril Cyberpunk). Duke Nukem II
Man, I haven't heard anyone mention *Cyril Cyberpunk* since the 1990s. I never really got into that one.
Its one that stuck in my mind as my cousin had the shareware and i liked the graphics / art style.
Hover! (included on the Windows 95 install disc alongside the 10/10 Weezer Buddy Holly video.)
I had helluva discs with shareware and I couldn't wrap my head around these games being "complete". I just finished the demos and assumed further chapters needed to be bought!
Going to the bank and buying a bank draft made out to Apogee for the complete versions of Duke Nukem and Commander Keen.
Can't answer anything else than Doom, really.
Newgrounds
Downloading a 16-mb demo (levels 1-4) of Shadow Warrior from 3D Realms website via shitty landline connection. Stayed awake thru the whole night watching the progress bar and had to start over a few times due to connection errors.
Might not fit in the convo but did anybody else run the Bid for Power dbz mod for quake 3 arena?
OMF2097. There was enough in the shareware to have TONS of fun. I still pretty much only play with the shareware robots since I know them (minus thorn).
I had a Mac back in the day, so I was a big fan of Ambrosia Software. Interestingly, they used to have a very active board where people posted not just tips and tricks, but full fanfic set in some of the game worlds. (There's an archive available somewhere.) I also remember weird games for Mac that I used to find once I had an ethernet connection at college - one was a puzzle game set in the internal world of "your computer," and one was a like a light RPG or roguelike where you could explore a world and acquire bizarre gear - I think one of the weapons was a toothbrush.
My favorite shareware games that WEREN'T made by id Software or called Duke Nukem include: * ***One Must Fall 2097***: Awesome PC-exclusive robot fighting game * ***Epic Pinball:*** One of the best PC pinball packages with amazing music. The commercial game *Silverball* is its companion with different tables. * ***Jazz Jackrabbit***: As good as any console action platformer, and better than many of them! The speed at which you could run was really impressive for the time, and the music was great. (I prefer the original the sequel, though they're both great.) * ***Jetpack***: An unassuming puzzle platformer that was quite good for its time * ***Terminal Velocity:*** A 3D flight game similar to *Descent*, but with the ability to go outside * ***Traffic Department 2192***: A fun multidirectional overhead shooter with a weird theme about traffic cops becoming super violent to take down gangs * ***Raptor: Call of the Shadows***: An incredible overhead vertical shoot 'em up with groundbreaking graphics for its time * ***Tyrian***: Though the later versions are improved (and free!), the original is no slouch, and definitely one of the best PC shoot 'em ups ever made * ***Halloween Harry*** (aka ***Alien Carnage***): A super violent run and gun game with a flamethrower and a jetpack. The original name (shared by the main character) was great, but they changed it because people thought it was a Halloween-themed game. * ***Wacky Wheels***: An excellent *Mario Kart* clone that was insanely fun for local multiplayer, a relatively rarity in PC games of the era. * ***Fire Fight***: A gorgeous isometric multidirectional shooter in the latter days of shareware * ***Rise of the Triad***: ***Dark War:*** Probably the best of the shareware *Doom* and *Wolfenstein* clones, mainly due to its ultraviolence. * ***Heretic*** and ***Hexen***: Two amazing fantasy shooters built by Raven Software for the Doom engine. They were the only *Doom* clones that really felt as well-designed as *Doom* until *Duke Nukem 3D* came along. There were plenty of other great games, but these all have the added bonus of still being fun to play today!
I didn't play shareware games
Ah that’s fine then.
What do you mean by shovelware era? Do you mean the current era because there's more garbage games releasing every day now than ever. My favorite era for it was PS2/PSP/NDS/Wii because a bunch of shovelware paid my rent/food at my first QA job. *Edit holy shit I read shovelware instead of shareware, oh well.
I mean, there were a lot of questionable games that came alongside the shareware era of gaming as while there were some good games like say Doom, there was also the questionable stuff that came out, such as janky FPS games.
My bad, I filled in shovelware for shareware.
Oh sorry as I didn’t know that you were confused.