In the 1980s, most shareware was created and distributed by individual programmers at home, on evenings and weekends, or on borrowed time from work or school. Registration fees were a friendly way for players (themselves sometimes hobbyist developers) to support one another, even if modestly. By the early 1990s, however, shareware had spawned its own ‘‘big business’’ wing, enterprising companies that assisted with payment collection (adding conveniences such as toll-free ordering by phone), large-scale floppy diskette duplication,
and postal exchange. The two most prominent of these full-service shareware publishers were Apogee Software and Epic MegaGames. Initially each company simply extended the reach of its founders’ own games: Scott Miller of Apogee’s Kingdom of Kroz (1987), and Tim Sweeney of Epic’s ZZT (1991). Both games offered a mix of adventure and puzzle play in a light fantasy theme, and both evolved the ASCII text graphics mode of Rogue and Beast to new levels of complexity with expansive, colorful maps interconnected across screens. Kroz eventually developed into an eight-game series, while ZZT’s level editor allowed users to extend the game with their own worlds, carrying its appeal to the current day.
With these early successes—ZZT is said to have garnered over 30,000 registrations for Sweeney1—Apogee and Epic began ramping up their publishing operations, providing a regimented distribution framework far more organized than solo developers previously had. Apogee released side-scrolling platform games like its in-house creation Duke Nukem (1991), and Commander Keen (1990) from id Software, an up-and-coming shareware developer founded by four friends from Texas and a client of Apogee’s distribution services that would go on to create the blockbusters Doom and Quake. Epic countered with the Jill of the Jungle series in 1992. But while popular on the PC by shareware standards, these action games lacked in innovation, and none could hold a technological candle to Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES, or Super Mario World (1991) on the SNES, the pinnacle of platformers by which all comers were judged. The IBM PC, intended more for business applications than games, simply did not have the dedicated graphics hardware found on game consoles from Nintendo and Sega.
One game published by Apogee in May 1992 changed all that, however: Wolfenstein 3D, id Software’s World War II-themed, Nazi-hunting, verging-on-camp breakthrough single-handedly popularized modern three-dimensional gaming and established the first-person shooter (FPS) genre that has been a staple in the 15 years since. While Wolfenstein 3D and its successor Doom are without a doubt the most widely known and successful games ever to use the shareware model, they were not the only advances to show that PCs could compete with and occasionally rival the flash of the console systems. 1994 in particular was a bumper year for Apogee and Epic, bringing a stream of releases with top-notch coding, graphics, and gameplay: Arjan Brussee, a skilled Dutch graphics programmer, finally made PC side-scrollers respectable with Jazz Jackrabbit from Epic; One Must Fall: 2097 (also Epic), was a highly capable 2-D fighter, offering some tweaks to the genre by employing robots as characters; and the vertical shoot-‘em-up genre, long the province of the arcade and consoles, was tackled by Apogee’s Raptor: Call of the Shadows, and Brussee’s next effort Tyrian, from Epic (1995).
Tellingly, these games were almost exclusively published, but not developed, by Epic and Apogee. That such ‘‘middlemen’’ companies could not only support themselves but indeed thrive through the shareware method signaled a continuing loss of meaningful distinction between shareware and the mainstream commercial games industry. One final example in this transition was Descent (1995), a unique 3-D action game that had players piloting a small craft through futuristic mining tunnels in outer space. The engine expanded upon the 3-D capabilities of predecessors in the first-person shooter genre by introducing a full six degrees of freedom, facilitated by the zero-gravity space theme— allowing the player to seamlessly look and move in all directions rather than remain confined to the ground. Descent was as technically sophisticated as any commercial PC game of the time, and while developed by the small company Parallax, it was published as shareware by Interplay, a traditional, fully commercial house that did not arise from
the same independent development community as did Epic and Apogee. The latter pub- lishers themselves drifted from their shareware associations and became fully integrated into the larger industry, where they remain prominent today: Apogee changed its brand name to 3D Realms in 1996 and subsequently developed the successful Max Payne games (2001), while Epic is responsible for the Unreal series (1998) and technology engine that underlies many of today’s most popular 3-D games. As home Internet access rapidly increased in the mid-1990s, commercial game companies began offering extensive ‘‘demos’’ of upcoming or newly released games, a free source of entertainment that drew attention and viability away from the remaining shareware developers who had not already gone to larger distribution houses. By the final years of the decade, the shareware model had fallen from favor.
The ‘‘shareware era’’ of the 1980s and 1990s was neither the beginning nor the end of games produced and distributed by individuals. As far back as the 1960s, programmers on university campuses across the country were trading and tweaking their own games, and ‘‘freeware’’ games (even if the term has lost much of its popularity) continue on many platforms today, with Web-based games the most notable. Yet for many curious users, shareware and freeware were the first chance to find and play video games—commercial or otherwise—on the new personal computers. Shareware flourished not only on IBM PC compatibles, but also on practically all home computer platforms of the day, including the Commodore 64, Atari 400/800 and ST, Spectrum ZX, and others. These games made many contributions to the evolution of gameplay and genre conventions, while the do-it- yourself spirit and economic experiments of what Jim Knopf (one of the original shareware founders) called ‘‘user-supported software’’2help to provide us with a richer social context for understanding video gaming’s establishment as a media industry, one of the largest and most important of our time.
Shareware Games: Between Hobbyist and Professional 157
Figure 25.4 One Must Fall 2097 (1994). This was one of the few successful action fighting games on the PC.
PART IV