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The Shareware Age Article
Retro PC Article by Robin Clarke
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The history of PC gaming can be neatly split into two eras. Everything from 1993 onwards we can class as the Modern Age, in which the PC is established as a games platform in its own right. (We can pinpoint 1993 based on the fact that before that year the number of PC games that have survived into posterity drops off precipitously.)
Everything before 1993 could be termed the Dark Age, a period shrouded in mystery, when there was no internet nor any dedicated PC gaming magazines, and when the "IBM compatible" was seen as just another home computer format among many (and as far as the UK was concerned, one that was both technically inferior to and several times more expensive than the riotously popular Commodore Amiga and Atari ST).
Thanks to this combination of factors most modern gamers are unfamiliar with the PC's formative years, having only joined the party in the mid-1990s after sound cards and CD-ROM drives had become standard features and the likes of LucasArts, Origin, Bullfrog and Westwood had started churning out big-budget blockbusters. While these big-name studios played a role in the PC's reinvention, most of the credit for realising the PC's true potential as a games platform came from a very different scene.
The Beginning
Carmen get her.
Our story begins in America in the mid-1980s, where the PC enjoyed rather more favourable conditions during its early life than in Europe. The Amiga and ST never really caught on in the States, and IBM PCs or fully-compatible clones (no shabby Amstrad 'word processors' over there) were cheap enough to make them a viable option as a home computer, although most were still situated in schools and offices.
The major publishers knew that there was an audience for PC games, but the process of manufacturing and distributing a game was so prohibitively expensive, and PC gamers so risk-averse (what with lacking access to the game demos and wealth of online information that we take for granted today) that they rarely ventured outside of a few tried and tested genres. (Yes, even more so than today, clever-clogs.)
PCs were the tools of Serious Business, and so it followed that PC games should be executive toys (World Class Leaderboard), teaching aids (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?) or dorky IT department humour (Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry). Minimum specs were dictated by the machines that players had access to in their downtime, with the idea of buying or upgrading a PC explicitly for the purpose of playing new games being the stuff of fantasy.
Larry, a man of leisure.
So what happened to transform the PC from the buttoned-down home of golf, chess and flight sims to the hotbed of creativity and innovation pumping out classic after classic from 1993 onward? Was it the inevitable result of technological progress? Only partially. Publishers seemed content at first to use the PC's expanding capabilities to simply make prettier golf, chess and flight sims.
How could the complacent PC games industry be shaken out of its torpor? Such a task called for nothing less than a revolutionary movement - an underground development scene, answerable to no marketing departments and dismissive of hidebound conventions about what PC users would consider 'worthy' uses of their sacred beige monoliths. Their success would hinge on the creation of fast, fluid, immersive games that would thrust the PC into the limelight and make Amiga owners involuntarily hiss with envy. Games, in a nutshell, like Doom.
That movement was known as Shareware.
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Comments: 1-49 of 49 in total
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squarejawhero
24/05/09 @ 08:16
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Um, there were plenty of family-friendly Sierra and Lucasarts titles, as well as Delphine, before 1993. Not all of it was Leisure Suit Larry or Space Quest, there was Kings Quest and Police Quest and the like as well, not forgetting conversions of Monkey Island, Future Wars et al. We used to trade these on disk in school and they were pretty popular titles. Not forgetting loads of other high profile releases on PC, like Pirates! etc...
... a case of forming an opinion to suit the article, methinks. |
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spliffhead
24/05/09 @ 08:28
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Let's not forget that Lucasarts/Cyan made millions of people buy CD roms and opened up the demo-cd magazine buyer users to these demos too.
And of course the amount of pron you could fit on a floppy was never very much, so it was win win for spending £400 on a 2x reader. Insert floppy/pron jokes at will.. |
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Praetorianer
24/05/09 @ 08:34
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Thanks for the flashback. I think it's time to read "Masters Of Doom" again.
Nowadays some of the business models resemble those Shareware days. Sometimes I feel like buying an incomplete (unfinished) product, where one has to wait for patches to make the game perform flawlessly. Then, one can buy (episodic) content as DLC to add functionality. I'd love to see developers giving away tools and possibilities to customers to make their own DLC and maybe even selling it online through the developers platform (like the iPhone). A very interesting title I found days ago is called "Auditorium". Play the game, and if you like it, buy it, get the complete game. Shareware, isn't it? And it's addictive, too. http://www.playauditorium.com Edit: @ Goffee: Some people still wonder today :)
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most recently on 24/05/09 @ 09:36
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These retro articles on a Sunday are always great. Brings back great memories. Maybe it's just because I was younger and less cynical but games were far more exciting then than they are now.
I really must get around to read Masters of Doom... I wonder if something based on the shareware model is something worth looking at today to help combat piracy. Release several levels and good few hours worth of play and once the end of the "demo" is reached you can immediately purchase an download the rest of the game. Might gain quite a few impulse buys. Further to this completely skip retail release and have online only distribution via this shareware like method, means there is no physical copy of the full game to pirate from. This would also help avoid leaks of the game, can't released a pirated version of the game early if it can't be activated. You will never stop piracy, it's been rife since the advent of video games, but I think there are plenty of options for developers and publishers to look at to help reduce the impact it has on their profits.
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most recently on 24/05/09 @ 09:40
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"Everything from 1993 onwards we can class as the Modern Age, in which the PC is established as a games platform in its own right. (We can pinpoint 1993 based on the fact that before that year the number of PC games that have survived into posterity drops off precipitously.)"
Err..no. The rest of the article is pretty decent though. Still remember all those games fondly. It's a shame though, up till '96/'97 there was a air of magic around it all (I still remember cycling home with a brand new copy of quake 1 and everything that pursued). Every time a new game would be released, it wouldn't be a new game but a new experience. Now it's just a new release of entertainment. |
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I remember seeing Doom the first time at a relative's computer (computers were a pretty rare thing in Romania at that time). I was utterly amased with the graphics, it was incredible. It looked so real.:))
Also I have fond memories of Jazz Jackrabbit and Commander Keen, used to play them for hours after I got my computer. Thanks for this article, it was nice to remember all these things again |
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gott_sei_dank
24/05/09 @ 10:00
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This is what Xbox arcade should have been like, give me a reasonable portion of a game minus the nag screens and fully featured without crippling of any modes and leave me wanting more.
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"Everything from 1993 onwards we can class as the Modern Age, in which the PC is established as a games platform in its own right. (We can pinpoint 1993 based on the fact that before that year the number of PC games that have survived into posterity drops off precipitously.)"
Err..no Why no? 1993 is absolutely spot on. It was the year PC gaming really took off, the 486 became reasonably affordble, people mothballed their Amiga's and Atari STs, and magazines dedicated exclusively to PC gaming started to pop up. |
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I remember one game I loved that was shareware, called Castle of Winds, was totally free but it ended on a cliffhanger. If you wanted the sequel, it was time to pay up! That way, you still got to play plenty but it still left you wanting more, which I feel is the point of shareware, or demos.
Luckily by the time I finished CoW1, I checked the devs site and he'd made part 2 free :) There are plenty of bits and pieces of great shareware out there. |
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Good Article. It bought back lots of nostalgic memories (sigh!). I remember spending nearly £2000 to build a kick ass PC to run games like Doom and Sydicate. (It was a i486DX 66Mhz as i recall, and i spent something like £250 on a 400Mb harddrive!). When i first installed Doom i remember phoning my best friend up and saying "Get here right now - you've GOT to see this!!). I think i spent the next 3 months completing Doom again and again, making up little challenges like completing the whole of episode one whilst only using my fists (that's ingame, not on the keyboard).....
.....Great times :) |
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Another good article that makes me feel old. Shareware and many of the games that did it make me remember some great gaming at a place I used to work, the boss was a huge gamer and we would waste afternoons playing Duke/Doom/Blood over LAN. Ah good times. At the time I was so jealous I didn't have my own PC!
/ Hugs PC and apologises for forgetting it's gaming side this gen and promises it some RAM, and a new Graphics card. |
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"Why no? 1993 is absolutely spot on. It was the year PC gaming really took off, the 486 became reasonably affordble, people mothballed their Amiga's and Atari STs, and magazines dedicated exclusively to PC gaming started to pop up."
Because the PC was already a well established games platform before that. Maybe not in the UK but over here it most certainly was. Probably due to differences in government funding & the lack of alternatives that the UK had. 93 was indeed the year that it all went up a gear, that games became better looking than the rest and that competition started to wither and die but it was an established game platform before that. Still, '93 till '97 where without a doubt the most magical gaming years I've encountered. You couldn't go around the block without bumping into something new. I'm still enjoying games today and know that 90% of the games from back then are utter shite now but the sensation is just gone. Perhaps the lack of proper paper magazines these days have something to do with it - going into town every week to pick up the latest copy, full with all kinds of juicy stuff. |
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I loved getting demo/shareware disks, My Dad used to buy PC Gamer and never read them and I just played the shareware games over and over and over and over. Then my mate was like a massive pirate although I didn't really know it was bad or illegal at the time, it was just lending disks for an hour or so.
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It seems to me that a lot of modern Devs could learn a lot from looking at how Shareware manipulated piracy for profit rather than trying to fight the ever losing battle against it.
Seems odd that there's no mention of Defcon as modern Shareware. Releasing your own game as a torrent and then bugging people to buy it seems a lot like Shareware to me even if it wasn't called that. I'm really not sure about the dismissal of everything PC before 1993 either. I remember playing a lot of good games on my PC back then, admittedly I think they were almost all ports like Starglider but some found fame on the PC first before moving to other systems, like Tetris for instance. Anyway, an interesting article from a time when I played games but was too young to know what the heck was going on. |
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"Because the PC was already a well established games platform before that. Maybe not in the UK but over here it most certainly was."
It most certainy wasn't in Germany, either, before 1993. Of course, I can't speak for the Netherlands, but I'd be very surprised. Might depend on how you define "well established". It certainly was all but meaningless next to the Amiga and ST here before that. I knew exactly one guy in the early 90s whose parents had a PC powerful enough to play games, because the father was working for Honeywell Bull. They weren't really affordable for most people, and noone I knew owned one himself (while everybody had a C64, and an Amiga or ST in their rooms). The first two PC gaming magazines in Germany were launched in 1993, and if you look at multiplatform magazines of the late 80s and early 90s (I still have them in the basement), the PC leads a shadowy existence at best. |
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KommanderKlobb
24/05/09 @ 13:00
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Great article. Well researched and amusingly written. Nice one!
I remember so clearly that day when I went round to a friend's house for lunch break, saw Doom for the first time, and the accompanying sense that everything was about to change. At that point, the games scene in my school was almost exclusively based around the SNES and Amiga. But after Doom broke, suddenly everyone was getting a 486 for Christmas, and from then on the Amiga scene really died away - Amiga Power became Amiga Pamphet, and its dying breaths were awful Doom clones like Gloom that the poor thing just couldn't pull off due to its hardware architecture(?) I seem to remember the next game that blew me away after I finally got my Pentium 90 being Magic Carpet.. |
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Oddly enough, after finding a pile of old PC magazines I've been doing a series of posts looking back at the formative years of PCs from 1989 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I'd agree that by 1993 the PC was finally accepted as a serious gaming platform, but the seeds were sown a couple of years before, not least by Wing Commander in '91.
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"Everything before 1993 could be termed the Dark Age"
I guess we're living in the second Dark Age of PC gaming now then. Crappy ports from consoles, annoying and intrusive DRM, unfinished products and horrible sales. Building a good PC for gaming has never been cheaper, they should get their sh't together. Sorry for the rant, this is a great article btw. It brings back many fond memories. |
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@UncleLou
Pc Review and PC Format existed at least since 1991. And multi format magazines like Zero or Ace were already paying good attention to pc with notable games like Ultima VI, VII and Underworkd, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Kyrandia and quite a few others already looking and playing better in pc vga than in Amiga or ST. Also, I think this article greatly overstates the importance of shareware before Doom, specially it's "technical achievements". Platformers like keen, duke nukem, jill of the jungle or helloween harry looked very primitive (and weren't as smooth) compared to many other commercial pc games of the era like Rick Dangerous 2, Gods, Bart Simpson vs Space Mutants, Rolling Ronny, Prophecy: The Viking Child, Magic Pockets, Wrath of the Demon, etc
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most recently on 24/05/09 @ 15:32
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I played lots of great games before 93 and if you are talking about hardware costs its only now that we are coming out of the dark ages. Back in the day when they knew how to code on one or two floppies I had Sentinel Worlds with Arnold and Sigourney look a likes. I had the original Mechwarrior where you would negotiate your contracts and build up your squad with recruits from seedy bars. Lakers vs. Celtics was always a good play and I had people queing up to play that.
There were scores of AD&D games like Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades. Then later Eye of the Beholder. Sierra had great puzzle games with mini games like Manhunter 1 & 2, Space Quest 3. Exploring planets was fun in Megatraveller. I feel privileged to have played so many great games before and after 93. |
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"Pc Review and PC Format existed at least since 1991. And multi format magazines like Zero or Ace were already paying good attention to pc with notable games like Ultima VI, VII and Underworkd, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Kyrandia and quite a few others already looking and playing better in pc vga than in Amiga or ST."
Fair enough - looks like the establishment of the PC as a serious gaming platform might have differed a bit then from country to country - I guess the launch of specific PC gaming magazines is indeed a good indicator. Like I said, I am not aware of any here /in Germany) before 1993. |
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jackthenipper
24/05/09 @ 15:52
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The article is great but the intro about a "dark age" is totally wrong choosing 1993. I'd set the date more at 1990 or even 1989.
There were plenty of PC gaming magazines before 1993. In the UK alone, PC Leisure was dedicated to gaming and launched in 1991, and IIRC the first issue of PC Format was in 1991 too. THere were others pre-1993 too but I can't remember their names, and other countries had their own equivalents. As for the idea that no one remembers PC games before 1993... how about Lucasfilm (Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion etc), Sierra (King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry etc), Origin (Ultima, Wing Commander etc)? They released on non-PC formats too, but their target format was the PC and it was the only format that got their continual support. The PC had lots of pre-1993 hit games like Prince of Persia, SimCity and Lemmings. (They were on other formats too, but so are most major games of any period.) These weren't obscure games, they sold by the million and were widely known. Lucasfilm's adventure Maniac Mansion had a TV spinoff sitcom in 1990 which ran for three series: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098851/ And what about all the game-centric hardware from pre-1993 like the Soundblaster and Ad Lib soundcards? Sure, 95% of the games released before 1993 are now forgotten, but 95% of PC games released now will be forgotten in 16 years time. That doesn't mean they were flops, and it doesn't mean they didn't have an impact. |
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I was 7 in 1993 and remember Doom and especially Quake fondly. I remember getting Quake 2 on release and my dad randomly getting a voodoo 2 for our PC. I called my mate up and we played Quake 2 all night, looking at the textures in wonder! What an amazing gaming era. I agree with that the magical sense of gaming has died. The first time I played Half Life was the most amazing gaming experience ever!
I managed to complete quake with just the keyboard too! I rock! (or was mouse just not supported?) |
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LlamaFarmer
24/05/09 @ 19:54
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A great read, I got into gaming during this era, and this brought back a fair few memories. Loving these Sunday retro articles :)
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notmyrealname
24/05/09 @ 23:06
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some of the best games were released in those days. I know there is marketing and money to be had but still I'm baffled time and time again for the complete and utter lack of originality the last o.. 5 years or so.
@ Shotgun ''+mlook ;)
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most recently on 25/05/09 @ 00:07
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"Article handily forgets all the hassle about removing TSRs and other stuff to free up enough memory to get some of those games running..."
Optimizing autoexec.bat and config.sys was an entire game in itself - I actually seem to recall occasionally competing with some of my buddies over who could free up most of those 640 KB on our 386 PCs back in the early 90s :). That was back in the days where I still enjoyed messing around with the technical stuff - and that actually continued until 6-8 years ago. Now however it really annoys me to no end when I'm forced to spend half a day every year or two, setting up a new PC with all what that includes in terms of Windows configuration, application installation, data backups that have to be restored etc. |
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Sunyavadin
24/05/09 @ 23:39
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Shareware is the way forward, I hope more developers realise this soon.
People will download a torrent of the game, play it, and if they like it buy it. It's common sense for all gamers to do so, and every single one I know does it, if not all the time at least sometimes. So why not make those torrents available on your site, with 30% of the game fully available, and an option ingame to pay the price of the game and download and install the remaining 60%? Torrents are the epitome of the shareware ethos. Wake up, publishers. |
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timberwolf
25/05/09 @ 00:17
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yeah... wtf happened to game demos. i remember when a demo gave you an accurate impression of the full game. not the new time limit (or heavily feature cut) guess work. :(
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I was a little late to the PC gaming party by the sounds of things. I first got my hands on a PC in 94 (P75hz, 16 MB-RAM!!) and my favourite games back then were Descent, MechWarrior 2, Tie-fighter, Doom I&II, Command & Conquer, Terminal Velocity and the Lucasarts adventure games. I remember the excitement of getting new cover disks crammed with shareware, demo’s and Mod’s, but I wonder if those saying it was a golden era are just saying this for reasons of nostalgia. Perhaps in 10-15 years time those in their 20’s and 30’s will be reminiscing about the first time they played crysis and what an exciting era Directx.10 was.
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most recently on 25/05/09 @ 03:38
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Thinking back, it does seem odd by today’s standards that games installed entirely to disk without the need of having the CD in the drive and could be installed on as many PC’s as you like. Amongst my friends we had pretty much all the big releases but each of us only ever actually bought a couple of games.
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"it does seem odd by today’s standards that games installed entirely to disk without the need of having the CD in the drive and could be installed on as many PC’s as you like. Amongst my friends we had pretty much all the big releases but each of us only ever actually bought a couple of games."
And thus the reason pc gaming is dead. |
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@Rodney
"Perhaps in 10-15 years time those in their 20’s and 30’s will be reminiscing about the first time they played crysis and what an exciting era Directx.10 was." Except it wasn't. DX10 has barely been an improvement over DX9. Maybe Dx11 will be a proper update but DX10 has been a bit of a disaster. I would be surprised if anyone sees that as a golden era. And I wouldnt worry about feeling guilty about pirating when you were young. 99% of kids did/do it and don't really think about weather it's wrong or not. And I'd go as far to say that 90% of people are bullshitting if they say they have never used at least one peice of illegal software. |
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Optimizing autoexec.bat and config.sys was an entire game in itself - I actually seem to recall occasionally competing with some of my buddies over who could free up most of those 640 KB on our 386 PCs back in the early 90s :).
Hell yeah. I used to have do multiple boot floppies, for different types of EMS and XMS setup, with enough drivers loaded to run certain games. I was glad when dos4gw caught on, as that largely eliminated the need for it all. |
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Plants vs. Zombies also had a very good demo – albeit time-limited – which gave you enough time to see what the game had to offer, without locking out too much stuff.
Plants vs. Zombies "demo" is the full game only limited to 60 minutes of play. When you buy the game after the time is up and unlock the game you continue at the exact point the game was stopped and nothing additionally is downloaded... The article is recalling fond memories of playing those Apogee games like "Halloween Harry" etc. :) Oh and yes freeing 620+ KB of memory was fun (LH, highmem.sys + setting values for sound cards like IRQs). In the end it netted me work in IT which I still do today so all is good. The company I worked for as student hired everyone that could set up networks for games like Duke Nukem 3D or Doom since those people knew a lot about networks already... |
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