This Is How You Could Buy Cheap PC Games Before Steam

Summary

• Shareware allowed budding developers to distribute their games affordably and reach a wider audience through copying and distributing floppy disks.
• The “Apogee model” of releasing games for free and requiring payment for future installments led to the success of shareware developers in the 90s gaming scene.
• The rise of the internet and online platforms like Steam eventually led to the decline of the shareware industry, but its legacy remains in indie game development.

While Steam is the place to buy PC games, especially with the frequent discounts, in the ’80s and ’90s, if you wanted a cheap way to play games, you’d need to turn to shareware. This method of distribution combined physical disk swapping and mail order, at a time when the internet was in its infancy and computer games were taking off in a big way.

What Was Shareware?

When personal computers became popular around the start of the 1980s, commercial software could be expensive. Many popular business applications, like spreadsheets and word processors, were priced out of the reach of home users and even some small businesses.

Even games weren’t cheap, which is why they were so widely pirated. This situation persisted even into the massive growth of home computing in the ’90s. It’s one reason that packages like Microsoft Works were popular and bundled with home machines.

A response to this was an outgrowth of the computer hobbyist scene. All over the world, budding developers would tinker with code and create applications, including the much-vaunted “bedroom coders.” While some programmers managed to package their applications on floppy disks shipped in plastic bags with the manual as fold-up photocopied sheets, the computer software market, including games, was getting more professional. Customers wanted to buy games in stores with packaging that didn’t look like something they’d pack a lunch in.

This shut out a lot of budding developers from the growing market. They couldn’t afford to duplicate massive numbers of floppy disks, print manuals, and stuff them into boxes. But what if they could get other people to duplicate the floppies for them?

A few developers, including Andrew Fluegelman, Jim Knopf, known as “Jim Button,” and Bob Wallace, popularized a new way of marketing software, alternately called “user-supported software” or “public domain software,” but the name that stuck was “shareware.”

What was different about this kind of software was that you were allowed to make copies and redistribute them. Since I’m mentioning copying floppy disks in a retro computing article, I am legally mandated to share the classic “Don’t Copy That Floppy” video from the ’90s:

The shareware producers, by contrast, said it was OK to copy that floppy. But if you sent them some money through the mail to “register” your copy, you could get manuals, tech support, and other goodies.

How Shareware Was Distributed

As the name implies, you could get a piece of shareware if someone made a copy of the disk and gave it to you. This was great if, like me, your computer didn’t have a phone line hooked up to it.

If you had a phone line and a modem connected to your computer, it was even easier to obtain shareware. Years before Reddit, computer enthusiasts met online through local bulletin boards where they dialed in through their modems. These bulletin board systems proved fertile ground for disseminating shareware, as many local BBSes were free to use as long as you made a local call.

These bulletin boards offered a forerunner of forums, but they also often had areas of files to download, similar to Dropbox in the present day. While pirated games were common on underground boards, the more legit operations had lots of freeware and shareware programs to download, and games were a popular genre of shareware program.

If you weren’t so fortunate to have a modem hookup, there was a cottage industry of shareware companies that would take your order and send you disks with the programs you requested. A few companies branched out into selling boxed copies. If you were lucky enough to own a CD-ROM drive, they would also sell you compilations of shareware programs on CD.

A 1988 episode of the PBS show ‘The Computer Chronicles’ shows how the concept worked in practice, though geared toward productivity software rather than games.

One of the shareware vendors I remember from my childhood was a company called The Software Labs, based in Southern California. They would mail out a catalog of software (remember catalogs?). You can browse an issue from 1995 on the Internet Archive.

When this catalog arrived every quarter, I pored over it, particularly the games section. There were a lot to choose from. My dad would always order them on 5.25-inch floppies, probably because they were cheaper than 3.5-inch disks.

Not only did TSL sell shareware disks, but they also came with a custom installation program. TSL stressed that the program was theirs, and not to copy that part of the floppy.

The ’90s Shareware Scene

Lots of users kept copying those floppies, the ones they got from their friends or local BBSes. But how would “registering” make sense for games?

A small outfit out of Texas came up with a model. Apogee released a role-playing game called Kingdom of Kroz in 1987. It was part of a trilogy of Kroz games. While the first installment was free, to continue playing the other two games in the trilogy, Caverns of Kroz and Dungeons of Kroz, you had to send them some money. If you want to play Kroz, you don’t have to pay anymore–Apogee, or later 3D Realms—released the entire trilogy as freeware.

The “Apogee model,” as it became known, was widely successful and widely copied by other budding game developers, like Epic Megagames and id Software, whose first hit, Commander Keen, was published through Apogee under the episodic model.

Shareware developers would ride the market to become some of the biggest names in gaming over the ’90s. id created the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein 3D, also published by Apogee. When id struck out on its own with DOOM in 1993, it revolutionized the industry.

While big companies like EA and Sierra dominated store shelves, shareware served as a form of viral marketing, with word of mouth and lots of copying of floppies spreading new games.

The popularity of shareware games and sales of registered ones allowed shareware developers to break into the mainstream gaming market, with real boxes and manuals sold in stores. id, Epic, and Apogee (renamed to 3D Realms) became gaming powerhouses with Quake, Unreal, and Duke Nukem 3D.

Whatever Happened to Shareware?

The biggest blow to the shareware industry was the growth of the internet. With more people getting online, there was less of a need to copy those floppies anymore. You could just download games from sites like Download.com or FTP sites instead.

With the growth of PC gaming, developers were setting their sights higher. Players demanded better games, and that meant AAA titles. There was less of an appetite for quirky titles like Corncob 3D where you fight aliens in an alternate history where World War II never happened.

The culture that grew up around shareware didn’t go away. There was still a hobbyist culture trading programming tips and making weird little games, even if it was nowhere near as visible as the heyday of the ’90s shareware scene. The ability to spread games by word of mouth was amplified by the internet. This was because, in contrast to consoles, anyone could make a PC game.

A lot of the people who would have written shareware gravitated toward Linux and the open-source movement instead. Coding can be fun, and not everyone wants to become a billionaire.

Most importantly, the arrival of Steam in the 2000s gave independent game developers another online storefront to market their wares, no dial-up modem required. The legacy of the shareware movement lives on in the success of quirky indie titles like Minecraft and Balatro. These games owe a large debt to the classics that spread gaming culture by word of mouth.

Open-source development tools made game development cheaper and easier for indie devs, and the lack of the need to ship physical disks also reduced development costs.

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Despite the claims from the Software Publisher’s Association in the ’90s, it seems that copying that floppy helped the gaming industry in the long run instead of killing it by enabling small developers to reach big audiences.