Looking back at Shareware

Older PC games may well remember the days of Shareware games. Shareware games were essentially a big chunk of a full retail game: often these games would be split up in episodes and you'd get the first for free to "wet your appetite" so to speak. It's a system that seemed like a great idea but ultimately, its success proved to be its undoing.

You see, Shareware games usually gave several hours of enjoyment so why would you want to buy games when there's hundreds of hours of good gaming out there? In reality, while Shareware was meant to seduce gamers to buy the full game, they would move on, devouring game after game like Pacman chasing pills. Heck, because Shareware could be distributed for free, many companies abused this system by throwing all kinds of Shareware on a single disk and then charging anywhere from $5 to $30 for it! Heck, often they'd just stick a single game on a disk and wouldn't even mention on the front that this was a Shareware game.

While Shareware ultimately failed, it did really help quite a few games. The huge success of Doom could easily be attributed to the widely spread first episode "Knee-Deep in the Dead" for example. But, putting aside the commercial value of the system, it's important to look at the more important aspects ...

Yes, the real value wasn't economical - believe it or not, it's not always all about money. TALENT! THAT was the real legacy of shareware! Not only big developers were releasing shareware games but also many bedroom coders. It was the ideal system after all: put your shareware game on the BBS or give it to magazines to put on their cover disks, and in return people could order your game through the mail. No need to spend a fortune on advertising or convincing retail stores to stock your game - let mouth to mouth advertising do this for you! The result was many excellent (if sometimes pretty ugly) games which helped to discover great talent and helped add colour to the very diverse PC landscape.

In the end, I greatly respect Shareware games of old - they gave me hundreds of hours of fun and gave me many fond memories. Often forgotten by time, many of these still deserve to be remembered ...