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              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC">volume 
                1, issue 24</font></b></font></p>
              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC"> 
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              <p>  <p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b><font color="#339900" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Today 
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        <p align="center"><font size="+3" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0022A8">Gimme 
          Your Money:<br>
          <font size="+1">A Half-Baked History of Shareware</font> </font></p>
        <p align="RIGHT"><font color="#804000"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By 
          <a href="mailto:jhague@dadgum.com">James Hague</a></font></b></font></p>
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        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The great shareware boom 
          started in June of 1991, when Apogee released the <b>Duke Nukem</b> 
          sidescroller (which, with hindsight, should probably have been called 
          Duke Nukem 2D). By this time only turtleneck-wearing die-hards were 
          still defending the Amiga and Atari machines, and with just the still 

          expensive Macintosh for competition, the PC had finally defeated its 
          more interesting rivals with longevity and sack-it-yourself grocery 
          store prices. Saying that <b>Duke Nukem</b> wouldn’t have gotten a second 
          notice if it had been released for the Nintendo Entertainment System 
          four years earlier (two years after <b>Super Mario Bros</b>. showed 
          up in the States) may sound like an insult, but it felt good to show 
          that a $2000 box could begin to approach a dedicated game system of 
          any kind. And Todd Replogle’s <b>Duke Nukem</b>, with speaker tweedling 
          sound effects by Scott Miller, sold fifteen hundred copies a month well 
          into 1992. For $30 a copy.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">id Software had been hooked 
          up with Apogee since 1990, with their <b>Commander Keen</b> sidescroller. 
          With the <b>Keen</b> sequel released the same month as <b>Duke Nukem</b>, 
          and the game everyone remembers, <b>Wolfenstein 3-D</b>, the shareware 
          waters started to become just the slightest bit cloudy. If you opened 
          up an issue of <i>Computer Gaming World</i> in mid 1992, there was an 
          advertisement for another <b>Commander Keen</b> game (<b>Aliens Ate 
          my Babysitter, </b>no joke) right inside the front cover—a game sold 
          in stores. And not long after the feeding frenzy of the <b>Wolfenstein</b> 
          shareware release, you could walk into Babbage’s and pick up a copy 
          of the game mildly reworked into <b>Spear of Destiny</b>, all gussied 
          up in a four color box right there on the shelf next to <b>Wing Commander 
          II</b>.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">id’s <b>Doom</b>—which despite 
          frustrated reminders from Apogee support entity Joe Siegler wasn’t released 
          by Apogee—was a monster hit when it brought down ftp servers and corporate 
          LANs in December 1993, and is usually cited as a crowning achievement 
          in shareware. But was it really shareware? You could download a playable 
          episode of the game, so I guess it was, but the game showed up in software 
          stores not much later. Barrels of tar were poured into the water over 
          the next few years, as supposedly &quot;shareware versions&quot; of 
          commercial software would abruptly end after a few levels, hawking the 
          related retail offering.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Not much later, &quot;playable 
          demo&quot; became the preferred term.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">For every Apogee and id, 
          there were hundreds of other indepdendent shareware game authors. In 
          fact, though the Apogee model was well proven, very few people jumped 
          on the bandwagon. A notable exception was Epic MegaGames, who started 
          out with the very <b>Kroz</b>-like <b>ZZT</b> series in 1991, and followed 
          it up with the very <b>Duke</b>-like <b>Jill of the Jungle</b> the next 
          year, a game that used to be advertised on the back cover of the now-defunct 
          <i>Shareware</i> magazine.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Other companies never had 
          rabid followers on Usenet, but still found success. I can’t remember 
          the initial offerings from Steve Moraff’s <a href="http://www.moraffware.com/">Moraffware</a> 
          without making retching noises, but fast forward to 1999 and you’ll 
          find that he now has ten employees and just as little press as ever. 
          <b>Capture the Flag</b>, a cute MS-DOS strategy game out long before 
          the <b>Quake</b> mod, sold respectably well. Of course most of the smaller 
          folks found that their hexes failed and never managed to eke a living 
          out of <b>Defender</b> clones and <b>Tetris</b>alikes.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Perhaps most fantastic in 
          light of all this, the rise of Jim Button and Apogee and id and Epic 
          and all the less media-hungry companies, is to remember that the Web 
          didn’t come onto the scene until 1994. Heck, Apogee didn’t even have 
          a web site until 1995! How did the 1500 people each month that doled 
          out their money, undoubtedly a minority of all the rubberneckers, manage 
          to run across <b>Duke Nukem</b> in 1991?</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Okay, trick question. The 
          Internet had been kicking since the disco days of 1975, so the lunatics 
          who tried to nab <b>Doom</b> in those first network-jammed, server-resetting 
          hours most likely did so from a textual ftp client. Or they fought for 
          a free line on one of the local bulletin board systems, using their 
          brand new 14.4K modem, which was a whole lot better than the six hundred 
          dollar 1200 baud model they used to snag PC-File in 1983.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Most bizarre of all, a <b>Doom</b>-wannaplay 
          could have waited a few weeks, then ordered the shareware version on 
          two floppy disks, for about five bucks a disk, from one of the many 
          companies who sold unregistered shareware on diskette. Think about this 
          for a minute. Instead of browsing the web, you had to request a catalog 

          using a bingo card from the back of <i>BYTE</i>, peruse the descriptions 
          of software written in an eight point font with a dozen programs to 
          a page, guess which ones sounded nifty, and then pay three to five dollars 
          a pop, plus shipping. And this was for <i>unregistered</i> shareware. 
          Sometimes demos for games like <b>Aliens Ate My Babysitter</b> and <b>The 
          Incredible Machine</b> were mixed in with shareware titles; you paid 
          five dollars for a demo! Most frequently, you pulled a 5 ¼&quot; disk 
          out of the mailbox seven days later to find that the game with &quot;the 
          most innovative gameplay ever&quot; was another variation of <b>Sokoban</b>.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The web put an end to this 
          nonsense and was a boon to developers everywhere, but the glory days 
          of sharware games have gone the way of the MS-DOS command line. Still 
          there, if you know where to look, but hardly at the forefront of an 
          industry. Don't get too complacent; many a popular band can look back 
          on their garage practice days and say the same thing.</font></p>
        <p>&nbsp;</p>
        <p align="right"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1"><i>- 
          James Hague is a programmer for <a href="http://www.volition-inc.com">Volition</a> 
          by day, and the sole programmer at his shareware company <a href="http://www.dadgum.com">Dadgum 
          Games</a> by night.</i></font></p>
        <p>&nbsp;</p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">References</font></p>
        <ol>
          <p>&nbsp; </p>
          <li>
            <p> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="http://pslweb.com/history.htm">The 
              History of Shareware and PsL</a> by Nelson Ford</font></p>
          </li>
          <li>
            <p> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="http://www.halcyon.com/knopf/history.htm">The 
              Shareware Story</a> by Jim Knopf</font></p>
          </li>
          <li>
            <p> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="http://www.apogee1.com/">Apogee 
              / 3D Realms</a> web site</font></p>
          </li>
          <li>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> The misspent youth of 
              <a href="mailto:jhague@dadgum.com">James Hague</a></font></p>
          </li>
        </ol>
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    <td><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2"><b>Credits:</b> 
      Illustration &copy; 1999 Chris Buecheler. Gimme Your Money is &copy; 1999 James 
      Hague. All other content is &copy; 1999 <a target="_self" href="http://www.loonyboi.com">loonyboi 
      productions</a>. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't 
      try it...or you'll pay. Oh, how you'll pay.</font></i></td>
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