But what does it mean to you?
To me, shareware represented the few games I managed to play for free throughout the ’90s.
In particular,Duke Nukem 3Dat lunchtime at Rupert Loman’s house.
(Rupert is the founder of Eurogamer/Gamer online grid.)
But that wasn’t a problem, it was legit, it wasn’t pirated.
We could keep playing for as long as we wanted.
- then we’d have to pay for it.
And I don’t think any of us ever did.
But that was shareware: finding stuff for free.
But I was a teenager!
), and how I found an RPG called Dink Smallwood, which I remember vividly to this day.
I’m genuinely curious.
And I learnt this from a new book called Shareware Heroes, written by Richard Moss.
That’s the equivalent of trying to follow all the separate threads in a bowl of spaghetti.
But Moss, admirably, manages it.
But games struggled to make any money from it, early on, apparently.
It was mostly word processing and other utilities making money back then.
Yours, “Scott Mulliere”.
Romero received a few of these.
And he wasn’t happy, but the two got to talking and a deal was made.
That deal changed everything.
It would lead to the Commander Keen series,Wolfenstein 3Dand eventually Doom, all released as shareware.
The other major throughline is Epic Games - or as it was originally called, Epic MegaGames.
But those are the big stories.
Shareware, really, was infinite.
It didn’t belong to anyone; therefore, it belonged to everyone.
There were no rules, no owners, and that was the fundamental pull of it.
Shareware was freedom: a way for people to release things without interference.
Ralph, to raise awareness and, eventually, money for the AIDs epidemic.
Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the game.
That’s the power of shareware.
The legacy of shareware is everywhere.
