Remember shareware? In case you don’t, Eurogamer has an article on that very subject. Although I take issue with their point of view.
Reading the piece, you’d get the impression that PC gaming was a ghetto, and it was only the efforts of id Software, Apogee, and Epic Megagames that ushered in a golden era for 16-bit+ systems.
Somehow, they managed to overlook SSI’s AD&D games (and strategy games, for that matter); Sierra’s line of adventure games (though mentioned in passing in a snarky way); Origins Ultimas; and various products from Microprose, to name a few that come immediately to mind.
Of course, none of those was shareware. So what? There was a pretty healthy PC gaming scene already. The one game they mention that really mattered was Doom, and we’ve been inundated with shooters ever since.
Certainly, shareware had its place. But, a title or two aside, it really wasn’t as big as Eurogamer thinks it was. Unless all they really care about are action/platformer/arcade stuff, which would be a big oversight on their part.
It was a bit of a ghetto. I mean, your examples, Scorpia, are incredibly nerdy and geeky.
I think what they’re saying is, really, that up until Wolf 3D people thought games like these were for kids or nerds.
I mean, for over a decade if you wanted to play a game you had to know how to mess around with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files, know which memory managers to use and what options to enable…
For over a decade! PC gaming wasn’t dead back then, but no way in hell was it an industry. A hobby, maybe. One that supported a pretty small industry, most definitely, and made some pretty goddamn good games. But a hobby.
Compare that with gaming today. There is a small core of “hard-core” people who spend an incredible fortune every 18 months or less to keep up with the latest cutting edge, but behind them we have casual players, indie gamers, old school gamers, amateur game designers, modders and the like.
It’s gotten so big that you and I don’t know 80 percent of the field. No one does, and no one expects to.
And yet you know you’re ‘hardcore olbie’ if you remember Kingdom of Kroz and Duke Nukem and Commander Keen and Wolf 3D. It’s gotten to the point where remembering Doom marks you out as an old gamer.
So they don’t focus on the early days. You’re right in saying that back in those days, the hobby had a rich community and tradition that produced incredible, wonderful games — games that people are still discovering to this day, that modern games still haven’t grokked yet.
But ghetto? Indeed it was.
It had to be an awful big ghetto, then, T-boy. I can remember when Electronics Boutique (back when it was called that, sometimes I forget to call it “EB Games”) was lined wall to wall with PC games and there were 3 around my city.
Now I admit I don’t know what percentage of people where there buying Printshop or Lotus 1-2-3. Maybe there were so many stores because of the business community. But I think alot of it was games.
what was the time frame that eurogames is talking about?
i was in europe till late 85 and the market for games was abysmal. If i’d not had stateside access gaming would have been none existent.
SO they may be taking about the euro scene where shareware might have played a bigger factor then it did in the western hemisphere.
after all their name is EUROgamer.
time frame was up to 93. so end of 85-93 i have no personnel knowledge of gaming software availability.
I do remember some Euro folks having issues with getting some software in 90 or 92 where they asked friends in the US to help out. but that was more of US version out now, and they didn’t want to wait X months for the euro version.
I believe that he got the cause wrong. Shareware might have played a part, but it was just a minor role. I believe the real reason is that the PC finally caught up to the rest of the playing field.
All of the games Scorpia mentioned such as the SSI and Sierra games were available on the Amiga which had built in stereo sound vs the PCs internal beeper, 32 color graphics vs EGA’s 16 or CGA’s 4, and no need to worry about tweaking autoexec/config or memory management. About the time that the 386 came out was when PC gaming started catching up. You could buy an Adlib or Sound Blaster and VGA graphics became the standard. I mainly gamed on the Amiga or Atari ST from the mid-80s to early 90s because the gaming experience on a PC was terrible in comparison and the costs were doubled and tripled and even then you had to shell out more for a sound card and EGA card, the equivalents of which came standard on an Amiga or Atari ST.
I think Coyote has the best rebuttal to T-Boy’s remarks:
Shareware and the Golden Age of PC Games
Xian, I dunno. Having had a PC beginning with the 286, can’t say I recall my experiences were bad (aside from the few games in - gak - CGA).
Doom was the first game where you could set someone with no prior gaming experience to sit down and they would immediately “get” it. Most other games involved long conversation with phrases like “so that little thing is me?” and “what’s HP again?” It was all abstract conventions that were hard to explain to someone that really wasn’t otherwise motivated. In Doom they were like, “ok, I’m in a hall and I’ve got a gun, how do I move?”
It was that immediately accessible non-iconic view of the world that made Doom so significant.
Barg, that wasn’t the only one (Doom). See today’s post for details.