Unearthing a shareware disc from 1995

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. This week, a mixed bag of 1990s… well, classics may be a strong word. Games that existed? Yes, let’s go with that. 1990s games that existed.

Before the internet became omnipresent, before the indie game revolution, there was a model called ‘shareware’. The idea was that developers could release new games cheaply, leaving distribution to fans and companies willing to act as distributors. Gamers meanwhile could get huge chunks of free game—for a long time, a third or more was deemed reasonable—with the option to send a cheque through the post and get the rest in about 28 days. Some people actually did this. Supposedly, anyway. All those pirated copies of Doom back in the ’90s had to have come from somewhere, I guess.

Let’s take a trip back in time to those days, with an example of one of these compilations, a little random action, and a bit of try-before-you-buy nostalgia from the ancient days of 1995.

The shareware boom was an interesting time for PC gaming. Other systems too, of course, but who cares about those? As you’d expect, the majority of it was absolute pap—endless rip-offs of games like Pac-man and Mario Bros, generic platformers, cheaply turned out trash and incredibly bad ideas that have mostly been deservedly forgotten, and only really got any distribution because coverdisc editors and makers of compilations like this needed something to fill a 650MB CD. That might not sound like a lot, but this was the era where most shareware devs were writing for for 1.44MB floppy disks.

Some amazing games were released as shareware though, the most famous being Doom. Shareware was also where genres typically deemed Not PC Friendly had a chance to flourish. Our answer to Sonic the Hedgehog for instance was the the then-Epic Megagames’ Jazz Jackrabbit. For the longest time, another of its games, One Must Fall 2097 was arguably our best beat-em-up, and Tyrian our best shooter. Elsewhere, 3D Realms started as a shareware company called Apogee, which saw great success through platform games and similar 2D action before finding its niche.

While there were BBS systems and similar to download these games from, at least in the UK—where the early internet was slow, shit, and charged by the minute for both the service you were connected to and the rarely local phonecall—most people I know, including myself and my split personality who occasionally liked to burn things, got our shareware from three main sources. Magazine coverdisks, with a K, offered a theoretically hand-picked game or two each month. The actual lump of paper they came with would also have several shareware depositories who would send you individual disks with games on, bought out of catalogues full of slightly over-hyped marketing blurb, but pocket-money friendly prices. My pocket money, anyway. Your parents’ generosity may/may have varied.

Finally, many shops, including bookstores, would have compilations on racks. There were, at a rough guess, 59,215,732,109 shareware compilation CDs during the ’90s. Very few are still floating around, because very few were notable. Today’s selection isn’t anything special either, simply one I noticed available for download on archive.org. Others are also available, though be warned—while DOS collections could lead to some amazing discoveries, Windows ones usually sucked harder than a vacuum cleaner in a quantum singularity. They’re also very unlikely to run any more.

So, to the games! This being a compilation, I’m not going to talk about them all. Instead, I’m using a highly complicated system to pick a few at random, on the grounds that otherwise we’d be here all day, and also you can download the entire disc for yourself and poke around at your leisure. The easiest way is to download and install DOSBox, create a new directory called ‘shareware’ or similar and drag the .img file into it, then drag the folder icon onto DOSBox. Type ‘imgmount D: ultimate.img -t iso’ and it should mount it as a disc. Then, type D: to change directory, and type Start to open the menu.

(As a very quick DOS primer, type ‘cd (directory)’ to change directory, as in ‘cd newgame’ and ‘cd..’ to go back one folder. Type ‘dir /p’ to see a list of files in a directory. In most cases, look for one ending in ‘.bat’ or with a name like ‘start.exe’, and type the first bit to run the game. 1995-ho!)

Wild West Skunny