Anyone remember shareware?
Oh man, Doom. Getting 1/3 of the whole game was incredible. Also Deus Ex years later. Some people hated the Ellis Island level, but I spent so much time exploring everywhere.
I fucked around so long that I failed the mission. It gave a prompt that I had 17 minutes left to do the last thing, and ran out by 20 seconds or sth.
Gotta give that game a whirl again soon, with proper textures & mods & fool around with ReShade for hours until my back hurts and I gotta lay down after an hour of actual gameplay, muhaha.
200+ Shareware games on a CD, played the shit outta those. And they came in magazines or were given out completely free.
I believe demos for games should still be the norm.
And they arrived (because I don’t want to use ‘came’ given this thread already) on cereal boxes.
I had never heard of that around here (Germany). Got my first PC '99, so I should have noticed; was looking everywhere for cheap Software deals. But there were some other companies which gave out free CD-ROMs as advertising with shareware and demo games. Some of those games were never finished, lol.
The Internet Archive has those Nestlé CDs btw :)
I think demos are coming back. I have a bunch on steam recently, and Nintendo has a ton of them on thier storefront.