If you're old enough to have lived through the early '90s, then chances are you'll recall the first time you played DOOM. Heck, the game was so famous at the time it even scored a mention on the American sitcom Friends – a sure sign of global superstardom, and no mistake.
What makes DOOM's success all the more remarkable is that when it was originally released, it wasn't sold through typical retail channels. Developer id Software instead distributed the game as 'shareware'; a common delivery mechanism in those days, shareware was built around the idea of giving away a portion of a game for free and then allowing the buyer to unlock the full version via a payment made directly to the developer.
As a result, there are many, many copies of DOOM on the market which are branded differently, as anyone could package it up and distribute the shareware version. You can see one such copy in the photos of this week's CIBSunday; purchased from an independent video game retailer in a sleepy English village in the early '90s, this is typical of DOOM packaging from the era.
DOOM would, of course, grow into a 'proper' retail release and would eventually find its way to practically every home system of the period, including the PlayStation, Saturn, Jaguar, 3DO and even SNES – but there's something truly magical about these early shareware releases.
Comments 3
I still remember pestering my father so we'd make a 50km trip to get a WOLFENSTEIN shareware disc. As far as Doom is concerned I don't remember how I got the shareware but I was the proud owner of a Ultimate Doom box at one time.
Also on the shareware subject I also remember (after some more pestering) getting to order a bunch of floppies from a list in a magazine.
Damn, we've come a long way... but good times nonetheless.
Shareware was great; this copy of DOOM is one of my prized possessions from the era. Looking at eBay they can change hands for quite a bit of money all these years later.
I was in year 6/7 at school when the shareware version of Doom released. I’d heard rumours of this fantastically violent game going around the playground but only in hushed whispers about something called ‘Doom’. Then mum surprised me by saying that she’d picked up the shareware copy as apparently ‘it was all the rage’. I couldn’t believe it and quickly realised that she had no clue as to what it really was! Still, the damage was done and it helped that my dad thought it was awesome too (despite the fact that to this day he doesn’t get video games at all).
I remember being surprised though that to get the rest of the game you had to send off to the US for it, so I didn’t get to experience the full game until I was 13 when I got Ultimate Doom: Thy Flesh Consumed. In fact I’ve just blasted through the first 3 chapters of Doom on Switch and I’m trying to get through Thy Flesh Consumed at the moment (massive difficulty leap there from Inferno).
Shareware was awesome, I got to play so many games for so little money: Wolfenstein, Doom, Rise of the Triad just to name a few. The early PC time in gaming was fantastic. Though I’m strictly a console gamer these days and have been for a while, there was a period of time when I’d lose hours to games on the family PC: X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Discworld, Day of the Tentacle, Doom 2, Resident Evil 2, Magic the Gathering, Road Rash.
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