If you bought PC games in the early 1990s, you'll remember the shareware rack. Stacks of 3.5 inch floppies in plastic sleeves sat on stalls at computer fairs and in the back pages of magazines, a couple of quid each. The price covered the disk and the duplication, and nothing else. The first episode was yours to keep and pass round to your mates. If you wanted the rest, you filled in an order form and posted a cheque to an address in Texas.
It sounds like a terrible business plan. It was actually one of the smartest distribution models the games industry has ever seen, and the money it raised paid for id Software's rise and, eventually, the Unreal Engine.
The Honour System
Shareware didn't start with games. In 1982 Andrew Fluegelman released a communications program for the IBM PC and asked people to send a donation if they found it useful. Jim Knopf, better known as Jim Button, did the same with a database program. Bob Wallace followed with a word processor and gave the whole approach its name: shareware. Copy it freely, and pay the author if you keep using it. By 1987 there were enough developers working this way to form the Association of Shareware Professionals.
The flaw was obvious. Most people never paid. Utility authors could survive on a small slice of honest users, because a good file manager or spreadsheet got used every day for years.
Games were different.
You finished them. Once you'd seen the ending, there was no reason to send money for something you'd already had.
Scott Miller's Trick
Scott Miller, a programmer in Garland, Texas, worked out the fix. His 1987 game Kingdom of Kroz came as a series of episodes. The first was free to copy. The others you had to buy. Suddenly the shareware disk worked like a demo with a cliffhanger, and the only way to keep playing was to order from Miller's company, Apogee.
This became known as the Apogee model, and it worked because it asked for payment at exactly the moment the player was most hooked. Miller built a steady catalogue of episodic games this way. His biggest move, though, was spotting talent somewhere else.
Keen and the Smooth Scroll
In 1990 John Carmack was working at Softdisk, a disk magazine publisher in Shreveport, Louisiana. He'd worked out a technique later called adaptive tile refresh, which redrew only the parts of the screen that had changed since the last frame. On an EGA card that was enough to give a PC smooth side scrolling, something the hardware was never meant to manage. Carmack, Tom Hall and John Romero proved it by recreating the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3, cheekily titled Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. Nintendo had no interest in a PC port.
Miller did. He fronted the money for an original game, and in December 1990 Apogee released Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons. Three episodes, the first one free. The team's first royalty cheque came in at roughly $10,000, which was enough to convince them to leave Softdisk and set up id Software.
Wolfenstein and the Doom Download
Wolfenstein 3D followed in May 1992, again published by Apogee on the episodic model. By most accounts it brought in around $100,000 in its first month. That was the point id realised it didn't need a publisher at all.
On 10 December 1993 id uploaded the shareware episode of Doom to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin. The server buckled almost straight away under the number of people trying to grab it. The full game was sold direct by mail order, and id kept the cut that would normally have gone to a publisher and a retailer.
The shareware licence did the marketing. Because the first episode was legal to copy, it spread across bulletin boards, university networks and office LANs faster than any advertising budget could manage. Some companies ended up banning it from their networks entirely. Under the hood, Doom ran in protected mode through the DOS/4GW extender, which let it use far more memory than the old 640KB conventional memory barrier ever allowed.
Epic and the Rest of the Rack
Apogee and id weren't alone. In 1991 Tim Sweeney, working from his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland, released ZZT under the name Potomac Computer Systems. It shipped with a built in level editor, and players made thousands of their own worlds with it. Sweeney renamed the company Epic MegaGames and kept the formula going with Jill of the Jungle, Epic Pinball and Jazz Jackrabbit, each with a free first episode and a paid remainder.
Apogee kept going too. Duke Nukem arrived in 1991 and Raptor: Call of the Shadows in 1994, and the company started putting its 3D games out under the 3D Realms name. When the shareware version of Duke Nukem 3D landed in January 1996, it was the same trick Miller had pulled nearly a decade earlier. Just with a lot more pixels.
Shareware Milestones
- 1987: Kingdom of Kroz introduces the free first episode model.
- Dec 1990: Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons brings smooth scrolling to EGA PCs.
- 1991: Tim Sweeney releases ZZT, the first game from the company that became Epic.
- May 1992: Wolfenstein 3D gives id its first big hit through Apogee.
- Dec 1993: id self publishes Doom over FTP and sells the full game by mail order.
- Jan 1996: The Duke Nukem 3D shareware release keeps the Apogee model alive into the CD era.
Why the Rack Disappeared
By the late 1990s the model was fading. CD drives made 600MB games normal, and you weren't fitting those on a floppy. Publishers moved back into the driving seat with boxed retail releases, and the free first episode turned into the demo disc stuck to the front of PC Zone or PC Gamer. Broadband and digital storefronts finished the job.
The idea never really died, though. Every Steam demo and every free to play game that hooks you before asking for money is running a version of Scott Miller's plan. There's a neat bit of irony at the end of it, too. The kid who sold ZZT by mail order from his parents' house now runs Epic Games, whose storefront gives away free games every week to get you through the door.
Shareware made its money on trust and a cliffhanger. Turns out that was enough.