The Shareware Publishing Concept - Challenging the Big Box Publishers

Shareware grew out of the "disk magazine" concept popularized by Softdisk.  For the price of a monthly subscription, Softdisk would send you a magazine with a disk or two every month packed with articles and reviews, small applications, utilities and most relevant to our discussion, games.  Softdisk made these disk magazines available for most of the popular home computer systems of the day, including the Apple II, Commodore 64 and Macintosh.  The IBM disk magazine was called Big Blue Disk, which had its debut in 1986.

Apogee Software, at that time in the person of Scott Miller, began the genesis of the Shareware concept in his Kingdom of Kroz series.  He built an engine that relied on ANSI text-based graphics for a game series called Kingdom of Kroz.  He published the initial games in this series in Big Blue Disk in the following issues :

Kingdom of Kroz - Issue 20
Dungeons of Kroz - Issue 29
Caverns of Kroz - Issue 35
Return to Kroz - Issue 47

The cover price for the magazine was $9.95, and every few months if you bought the magazine or subscribed to it, another game in the series would be available to you.  Eventually, it appears that Miller got tired of distributing through Softdisk and decided to distribute on his own through Apogee.  He struck upon the model that the first game in a series should be free (over a BBS) or available at nominal cost (for packaging and media) and the other games should be sold for retail prices.  The idea began to bear serious fruit and Apogee replaced Softdisk as the dominant publisher of low-cost PC games.

Eventually Softdisk brought out a game-specific subscription service called Gamer's Edge where the games would be provided by id Software.  A three month subscription to this service could be had for $29.99, sixth months for $49.99 and twelve months for $89.99 in 1991 dollars.  id Software, consisting primarily of John Carmack, John Romero and Adrian Carmack in the beginning, would fulfill their contract to provide a game every other month for Gamer's Edge as well as develop and release Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons.  Keen was released as shareware and published by Apogee.

The shareware aesthetic initially went to the lowest common PC hardware denominator.  Early games supported CGA 4-color graphics or 80-column ASCII/ANSI text modes, just like many programs that were simply shared from user to user in the 1980s.  In 1990, John Carmack had discovered how to make EGA cards perform pixel-perfect horizontal and vertical scrolling without consuming a ton of CPU time.  The EGA hardware was far more advanced than the CGA hardware, even though the resolution stayed the same and the color palette did not increase for most people. When Softdisk did not want to publish Commander Keen for fear of alienating all its CGA customers, id went to Apogee, which was not.  EGA was already an old graphics standard, but in 1990 and 1991 it had a mini-renaissance due to games like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Crystal Caves, Major Stryker and Catacomb 3-D.

Eventually, the shareware market was dominated by three companies, Apogee Software (later 3D Realms), id Software and Epic MegaGames (later Epic Games), even though id Software was only a developer.  id Software is known for its milestones, Commander Keen, Catacomb 3-D, Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom and Quake.  Epic MegaGames had the well-known Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball and Xargon. Apogee continued with Duke Nukem, Monster Bash and Rise of the Triad.  Softdisk hardly bowed out, it continued to publish games in the Dangerous Dave and Catacomb series.  Apogee and Epic published some well-known shareware titles like One Must Fall 2097, Tyrian, Raptor and Blake Stone developed by third parties.  Even some big box publishers associated with shareware developers, Interplay released Descent despite its status as shareware.

Shareware games are typically broken down into Episodes or Chapters.  The first of these was made available "for free" to encourage the player to purchase the full game.  This encouraged the established companies to start releasing playable demos of their new games, nothing advertises a game like a free playable sample of the gameplay.  Previously, most demonstration programs were just trailers showing gameplay footage running in a loop not unlike the attract mode of an arcade machine.  They were usually intended for a PC being displayed by a store.  However, whereas the commercial demo usually offered an hors d'oeuvre, a shareware version of a game contained a full episode, a free continental breakfast.  When you look at any shareware release, you could typically be guaranteed several hours of playtime, depending on the difficulty of the game.  Typically the full game would contain three episodes of roughly equal length. The later episodes would typically be a bit more difficult, maybe a little longer and sometimes offer new enemies, weapons and items.

In the DOS days, almost nothing was specifically for free, there was always a cost for acquisition associated with software.  If you purchased a shareware title in a store, you may have had to pay $5.00 because the retailer expected a profit.  If you downloaded it over a BBS you typically had to pay long-distance charges.  Downloading 1.44MB over a 9600 baud modem takes a lot longer than you think.  Services like Prodigy and CompuServe were accessed by fee-subscription only if you were using them to obtain games.   If you wanted to send away to the company for a disk, you had to pay shipping and handling.  Even if you copied a game from a friend, you were still paying for the disk, which usually ran to $1 per disk in the first half of the 1990s.  The shareware versions of the game were freely distributable as far and wide as they could go.

While sometimes the full game could be bought in stores, more frequently you had to purchase the game from the company directly by mail order. In today's world, where 2-day shipping from Amazon is considered good service, having to wait 2-3 weeks for delivery must have been miserable.  In the 1980s and 1990s, mail order was a major means of acquiring computer software.  Sometimes you could get deals and othertime you had to use mail order because your local Babbages, Electronics Boutique, Software Etc. or Computerland just did not have a copy of that particular game or application in stock.

In the EGA shareware era, platform games dominated.  These games were in short supply from the big box retailers and frequently did not compare to games being released for the NES, the dominant home video game device of its day.  NES games were very expensive, retailing around $50 and big box PC games were often priced at $50 and sometimes more.  By offering a similar product to the NES at a far lower cost, shareware games became sufficiently successful to fund small development houses.  However, none of these games had quite the magnificence of Super Mario Bros. 3 or Kirby's Adventure.  The NES could display more colors than EGA cards in 200-line modes, but in some games like Commander Keen 4-6 and Keen Dreams, the graphical objects were colorful and well-drawn and animated, making for a lively game.

However, eventually EGA became long in the tooth and everyone had VGA graphics, and developers began to follow suit by almost exclusively supporting VGA only.  Around this time, the success of Wolfenstein 3-D meant that more and more shareware games were going to be first person shooters.  Wolfenstein and especially DOOM caught the attention of the world to the shareware distribution model.  Whether legally or illegally, Wolfenstein and DOOM became nearly ubiquitous.  Who doesn't like to kill Nazis with a Chaingun and hear their dying screams?  I bet when someone killed Hitler in Episode 3, they may have said something like "Take that you Fascist pig, that's for Auschwitz!"  Established companies had to bring out their own first person shooters to compete.

Shareware games frequently pushed technical limits of the hardware they intended to be run on.  Big box PC games of the early 90s were typically relying on VGA Mode 13h 320x200 and its single video page.  Shareware VGA games used unchained mode to provide for four video pages, tweaked Mode-X-style resolutions like 320x240 and high refresh rates.  Most shareware games preferred to work within the hardware capabilities of VGA cards, I cannot think of many that supported SVGA resolutions and color depths.  Eventually shareware games like Wolfenstein and DOOM were ported to home consoles with wildly varying degrees of success.

Another issue with shareware games is that they tended to avoid less-common graphics and sound hardware.  No shareware game using 16-color graphics supports Tandy Graphics, even though games that did support Tandy and EGA almost always looked identical.  If you were looking for support for audio devices other than Adlib like Tandy sound, Game Blaster or even Roland MT-32, look elsewhere.  Adlib music quality was frequently first rate compared to strictly retail games which tended to focus more on the dominant MIDI devices of the time, the MT-32 then the Roland Sound Canvas.  Games supporting digital sound typically did not support anything beyond the Sound Blaster series and clones at first.  Eventually, however, there was some support for the Gravis UltraSound (often buggy) and General MIDI devices.

One hugely important development spurred by shareware was licensing game engines.  When id created Wolf3D, they licensed the technology out to Apogee to create Rise of the Triad, Capstone for Corridor 7 and Raven Software for ShadowCaster (published by Origin Systems).  Its DOOM engine found even more widespread support and id quickly became known for the quality of its 3D engines.  Of course, id had a secret weapon in John Carmack, who understood what was possible with hardware and graphics engines and has continually pushed boundaries for decades.  It was rare for big box companies to license their technology to its competitors, but eventually many of them would license the engines from id and Epic (Unreal) for their games.  One positive aspect from the shareware era was the policy of companies like id Software to release the source code to their hardware engines to allow others to make source ports of these games and design custom maps.  Many shareware games from this era have been made freeware compared to big box companies that will sit on their decades-old IPs.

Quake was the last great shareware game.  It may have been too successful because with the shareware release you could play multiplayer as you liked with anyone else.  DOOM had begun the process of players making custom multiplayer maps, but it was Quake where things began to explode.  Quake offered easy internet multiplayer through QuakeWorld, which was a Windows 95 executable with support for TCP/IP multiplayer.  It is no accident that Quake II and its successors were distributed on a strictly demo/retail basis.  However, where shareware began by catering to users or lower-end hardware, DOOM and Quake required 486s and Pentiums for any real playability, and those CPUs were still new and expensive at the time of those games' releases.

Windows 95 foretold of the impending doom of the shareware model.  Shareware games had to compete with a platform that was far more friendly to cheap, casual games than DOS ever was.  In addition, Windows games frequently came on multiple CDs and ran to hundreds of megabytes in size.  Most commercial versions of shareware games were not copy protected and were frequently pirated. Development costs had skyrocketed for quality products, as had support obligations to match.  In the end, the successful companies like id became a big developer with Quake II-4 and DOOM 3 and Epic a big publisher with its Unreal and Unreal Tournament series.

The closest thing to shareware today in terms of its distribution is the chapter/seasons releases from companies like Telltale Games.  In the Telltale Games commercial model, a complete story in a game was released as chapters or episodes over the course of several months.  One some platforms, now mainly mobile, you could usually obtain the first episode for free and then decide if you wanted to pay for later episodes.  If you knew you wanted the full game, you could buy a full season pass and receive chapters automatically as they were released.  On PC platforms, typically the season pass was the only option available and you just have to wait for the next episodes to be released.

How Game Remakes Skew Perceptions

When you play a remake of a game, then progress to the next game in the series, which has not been remade, often you can feel a sense of disappointment.  This is because you have not really progressed through the series as the developer intended over the years.  You are getting only a skewed impression of a game when you do not play the original.  In this post I will profile a couple of well-known series in which the first game was remade at a later point and dramatically changed expectations for the next games in the series.

Ultima to Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness

Ultima - Title 1

Ultima - Title 2

Ultima - Demo 1 

Ultima - Demo 2

Ultima - Main Menu

Ultima - Character Generation

When Richard Garriott was programming Ultima on his Apple II Plus with 48KB of RAM, he programmed the game using Applesoft BASIC for the most part.  He released the game in a ziplock bag with a crude manual through an early distributor of computer software called California Pacific Computer in 1981.  The game was a comparative success, selling about 50,000 copies at the time, in the nascent computer game market. However, Temple of Apshai and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord were much more successful at this point.

Five years later, Garriott was publishing his own games through his own company, Origin Systems.  Sierra On-Line released a port of the game for the Atari 8-bit computers after California Pacific Computer went bust in 1983.  Sierra also released Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress across almost every major computing platform of the mid-1980s.  Origin had already had considerable success with Ultima III: Exodus and Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, publishing both games on most major computing platforms.  Feeling the original Ultima was a bit clunky and rather hard to find, Origin decided to give it an assembly-language makeover.

Ultima 1 - Title 1

Ultima 1 - Title 2

Ultima 1 - Title 3

Ultima 1 - Title 4

Ultima 1 - Main Menu

Ultima 1 - Character Generation

Even though both Ultima and Ultima I were developed on the Apple II and fit on one double-sided disk, the differences are quite profound.  Ultima gives you an intro with crude outline drawings.  Ultima I gives you a colorfully animated intro with an Eagle and a sword being thrust up out of the water, Excalibur-style.  Ultima uses the Apple II text mode and mixed text/high res-graphics mode, Ultima I uses graphics mode everywhere.  Screenshots of the two versions look similar, but the differences in gameplay are quite drastic.

Ultima - Castle

Ultima - Town

Ultima - Outside 1

Ultima - Outside 2

Ultima I is a lot less frustrating to play.  You move over the overworld quickly, and can see your enemies coming.  Ultima has a slow shifting overworld and you do not see enemies until you are on top of them. There are more than one town and one castle map in Ultima I and you move much more quickly across them.  In the dungeons, Ultima I gives rapid movement while Ultima redraws the screen every turn.  Finally, when there is dialogue, you see it overlaid on the main graphics area rather than on the four lines of text.

Ultima - Dungeon 1

Ultima - Dungeon 2

Ultima - Death

While there are many more differences between the two versions, you can get a sense that the remake went through a lot more polish.  The presentation was also vastly upgraded in the remake, with a large cardboard box and a manual that gives detail about the world and feelies in the form of Sosarian coins.   There are also cardboard maps of each of the four continents in the game.  The original (non-Progame) manual does not even give you your goal, you have to learn that via the pub in game.  The manual illustrations also got a huge boost in quality.

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 1

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 2

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 3

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 4

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 5

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 6

When you go from Ultima I to Ultima II, you may be disappointed.  In Ultima I, you could shoot with some weapons more than one tile but you can't in Ultima II.  Your stats in Ultima II will roll over if they go above the maximum, they do not in Ultima I.  Ultima II has some nasty saving rules (essentially whenever you enter or exit a town or dungeon on any Earth time period).  Death in Ultima II requires a reboot.  While death in Ultima did allow for resurrection, the pathetic stats you continue with and the possibility that you may respawn on a mountain or ocean time make it useless.  Ultima I is sufficiently lenient with death and respawning to make it worth considering.  Ultima II has vast and mostly empty overworlds and the dungeons are not particularly useful.  Ultima II does not have custom text fonts (with the exception of the Apple II update in the Ultima Collection) and the PC version does not have an animated intro.

Ultima 1 - Town 1

Ultima 1 - Town 2

Ultima 1 - Outside 1

Ultima 1 - Outside 2

Ultima 1 - Castle 1

Ultima 1 - Castle 2

However, when you compare Ultima to Ultima II, there are many, many improvements.  First, the towns, castles and the overworld all use the same tiles.  Second, the world is far larger and exploring it is no longer a chore.  Third, you can explore planets and do not have to engage in space combat.  Fourth, the dungeons can be mapped, they are no longer randomly generated each time you start a new game.  Fifth, there are many, many more items to acquire from killing enemies.  Sixth, you can warp to different time periods in Earth with Time Doors instead of needing a boat.  Seventh, you can talk to people in towns and castles, some of whom will provide you clues without payment.  Eighth, water now animates, giving a more lively feel to the world. Ninth, there was a proper manual, box and cloth map.

King's Quest to King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown SCI

The original King's Quest was released for the IBM PCjr. as a showcase for that system's graphical capabilities.  It came on one floppy disk and that disk was copy protected and cannot be installed to a hard drive.  Sierra released versions for the IBM PC and Tandy 1000 when it discovered that PCjr. sales were not going to break any home computer sales records.  Eventually it ported King's Quest and its other games to many platforms.  In late 1986 or early 1987, Sierra revised King's Quest for the PC to support hard drives and improved the music and sound effects, added support for EGA, MCGA, VGA and Hercules graphics and added drop down menus.  This brought the game to parity with King's Quest II and King's Quest III in terms of presentation at the cost of an extra disk. Even with improved 3-voice PCjr./Tandy music support, things sounded a little sparse.

King's Quest - Title

King's Quest 1 SCI - Title

In 1990, Sierra decided to remake King's Quest I and the other inaugural games in its Quest series (Police Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Leisure Suit Larry) with its new SCI engine.  King's Quest came first and still used 16-color graphics and a text parser.  However, these graphics were far more detailed because they were in 320x200 instead of 160x200.  A musical soundtrack was added supporting the popular sound devices of the day, Adlib, Game Blaster, MT-32, Tandy 1000.  It even supported the DACs found in the later Tandy 1000s and the Sound Blaster for sound effects.

King's Quest - Castle of King Edward

King's Quest - King Edward's Throne Room

King' Quest - King Edward's Quest

King's Quest I SCI - King Edward's Castle

King's Quest I SCI - King Edward's Throne Room and Quest

Of course, Sierra did not leave everything in place exactly the way it was.  The Sorcerer's spell can leave you vulnerable to other monsters now (death by Ogre, theft by Dwarf) and different monsters can appear on the monster screen.  The most infamous puzzle (involving the Gnome) now has a different solution.  One item has to be found in a different place.  The castle takes up three screens instead of two and the screen scrolls rather than redraws.  Instead of playing the introduction, you watch it.  The game is now linear, you have to complete the quests in a certain order.  The Magic Shield, which could shield you from almost any enemy, must be found last.  Essentially, the changes allowed Sierra to keep people who played through the original version (and may have kept their hint book) from breezing through the game as well as give a more cinematic flair to the original game.

King's Quest - Golden Egg

King's Quest - Dragon's Lair

King's Quest - Stairway

King's Quest - Gnome

King's Quest - Witch's House

King's Quest - Woodcutter's Hut

Sierra eventually dropped its plans to remake all their old games in each quest series.  Remakes took a long time to make, were not cheap and did not sell as well as original games.  When Sierra began to release CD compilations of its Quest series games, it would release both the original game and the remake.  If you played the remake, you would be disappointed when you played the next games.  From King's Quest I SCI, the next two games would appear to be inferior because they are still using the AGI engine.  With other Quest series games, the contrast would be even starker because their remakes were using 256 color VGA graphics.

However, in August, 2001 a group of fans remade the SCI remake with 256-color graphics and support for then-modern computing platforms.  King's Quest I "VGA" was released and received major upgrades in version 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0.  The game was last updated in September, 2010.  King's Quest I VGA followed in the footsteps of Sierra's other SCI remakes by using an icon based interaction system.  Graphically it is on-par with King's Quests V and VI and takes a few assets from the former. It essentially follows the Sierra SCI remake in terms of quests and solutions.  Music was originally General MIDI based (the MT-32 was supported directly) but was later digitized.  Support for digital speech came as an option in 2.0, which in those days was a hefty-sized download.  Eventually speech became integrated into the main download, and they got Josh Mandel to voice King Graham as he did in the CD versions of KQ5 and KQ6.  The portraits were given a graphical overhaul in 4.0, making them look more professionally done.

King's Quest I SCI - Witch's House

King's Quest I SCI - Woodcutter's Hut

King's Quest I SCI - Suspended Walkway

King's Quest I SCI 0 - Golden Egg

King's Quest I SCI - Gnome

King's Quest I SCI - Dragon's Lair

KQ1 VGA was well-received, and encouraged Tierra Entertainment, later known as AGD Interactive, to remake more games.  They released King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, and later King's Quest III: To Heir is Human Redux.  Infamous Adventures also released a KQ3 remake and a Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge remake.  Eventually, even Sierra developers got into the act, Al Lowe released Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards in 2013 as Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded.  Of course, in LSL's case, that game was sold for profit received a license from Activision, which owns the Sierra IP.  The other games were fan remakes are freeware and are tolerated by Activision with a fan license.

Educational Games

However, if you want to get really nutty about remakes, no article can go without mentioning Sierra's Mixed Up Mother Goose.  Sierra originally released the game as an AGI game in 1987, then an SCI 16-color remake in 1990, a 256-color SCI remake on floppy and CD-ROM in 1991 and finally a Deluxe SVGA remake in 1995.  This continual cycle of remaking the game was important to try and capture each new generation of preschoolers with a game with graphics and features they would appreciate.

It is not uncommon for educational/edutainment games to nearly-continually reinvent themselves to keep up to date with new technology.  Math Blaster began on the Apple II and the last game in the series was released for Windows 7.  The Oregon Trail has been around for 40 years, beginning on an HP2100 minicomputer, a beast the size of a large dresser, but the latest edition has been released for mobile devices far smaller and more powerful.  Despite vastly different technologies that have come in that time, the basic game is still the same.