One of my favourite facts about this era is that the shareware episode of Doom was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows, a feat that no piece of software had managed before, and one nothing will likely accomplish ever again. Used by the smallest of indie devs to recognisable names like iD Software and Epic Megagames, this method took off hard, and came back with many, many profits. Developers would often split games into episodes, with a shareware release containing the first and the rest available for a bit of cash. The business model worked especially well for games. So naturally, many bullet-board systems, file servers and workstations held massive stockpiles of free-to-try programs.
If you ever used software in the MS-DOS and Windows 95/98 days, you probably saw splash screens like DOOM’s bright-red call to action.įittingly, shareware titles often told users to share the software anywhere they liked. Originally invented as a counter to freeware, shareware programs gave users time or content-limited demos, with instructions to order usually provided in the package. You would see this screen at the end of the DOOM shareware release. And when it was difficult to share around software without physically handing out floppy disks, it’s no surprise that shareware took off. Remember, we’re talking about a time with no internet, next to no distribution on a small to medium scale that wasn’t a couple of people doing labour labor by hand, and computers not being as popular as they are today. Shareware was the name, and it was arguably one of the most inventive forms of distribution for games and software.
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An entire industry built itself around the idea of giving people freely distributed packages, to convince users to buy the full product.
The earliest roots of the demo as we know it can be traced right back to the computers of the '80s and '90s. This resulted in shareware, demos and demo discs, free slices of playable content that spawned one of the most interesting phases in the gaming. Back before YouTube and Twitch and always online DRM, developers needed more effective ways of marketing than just relying on word of mouth.