A History Of Shareware Games

Software distribution has gone through a lot of changes since the early days of personal computing. Before we were able to deliver data at lightning-quick speeds over our phone lines, programs were copied onto floppy disks and sent through the mail, with no real copy protection having been invented. Programmers and developers explored many ways to get paid for their efforts, from traditional retail to more honorable methods. One of the leading forces in the propagation of this software was shareware games and other programs. Shareware refers to a business model in which the user can distribute and use the program for free, but to unlock its full features the user must often make a payment to the programs creator. In this piece, Ill spotlight some of the earliest and most important shareware games and show you how they shaped the home computing industry.

The earliest shareware titles were not games at all in the early 1980s, several programmers released utility and productivity programs through the model, including PC-Talk (a communications program) and PC-Write (a word processor, which was the first released title to be called shareware by its creator). Early shareware games first bowed their heads in the late 1980s, with a wide distribution network of copiers and traders helping to spread the programs far and wide, but it wasnt until the early 1990s that these games would truly rise to become an important force in software development.

In the early 90s, the rise of the Internet allowed shareware games to be distributed more easily than ever before, with popular portals like Fileplanet and Happy Puppy allowing users to download games quickly and easily. Many of todays biggest PC development companies got their start in this period, with Epic Megagames and Apogee Software among the leaders. Some of the most popular shareware games in this early period were the Commander Keen games produced by iD Software, which would go on to produce Doom. Apogee also introduced a variation of the shareware model in which paying customers would receive further installments of the games they bought by a subscription-based service.

As copy protection became more robust and easy to use, shareware games quickly dwindled, being replaced by time-limited or demo versions. The last vestiges of the market can be seen in the world of free downloadable casual games, which are usually set to allow the user a free hour of play before closing down and prompting for an easy credit card payment. This is one of the most successful areas of the PC software market, and the developers and publishers exploiting it owe their success to the early days of shareware.

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