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Epic's Sweeney On the PC Shareware Revolution

Posted by Soulskill on from the who-didn't-love-a-good-8-bit-nag-screen dept.

simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, there's a massive new interview with Epic (Mega)Games founder Tim Sweeney, the guy who's still a key technical figure at the Unreal Engine/Gears Of War developer. He discusses his early programming days, the story behind classic shareware game/tool ZZT, the origins of Epic, the '90s shareware business, and even a bit about the future as well. Particularly neat is his revelation that you can still order ZZT via mail, with orders fulfilled by his dad: 'My father still lives at the address where Potomac Computer Systems started up, so he still gets an order every few weeks... he's retired now, so he doesn't have much to do. Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders, put disks in them, and mail them out.'"

10 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Poor dad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    He's going to get thousands now it's on /.

  2. shareware by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The reasons why shareware exploded into growth in the 90s were because of a number of reasons. Hardware was expensive, today if a game doesn't work because you have too little RAM all you need to do is spend less than $20 and get a gig of DDR2 RAM, likewise if you don't have enough storage, you can move some pictures or movies onto a few GB flash drive for less than $20, if you don't have a fast enough graphics card all you need to do is spend $100 and you can get one that will handle most games (well, perhaps not Chrysis but other than that....), if your CPU is the bottleneck you can get a decent enough box for less than $500, back in the 90s an upgrade like that could be a thousand dollars or more. Shareware gave you a chance to make sure the game ran decently before you spent $50 on it. It also curbed piracy, by giving away part of the game for free pirates had something to distribute other than the full game. On the other hand shareware was as annoying as heck and still is especially on non-PC platforms such as Windows Mobile, iPhone (though due to the app store its a lot better than on Windows Mobile), or the generic cell phone.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:shareware by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Heh.. that certainly sounds like a good theory. But personally I think it was because it was significantly more effort to move around large amounts of data (a whole game) vs a small amount of data (the demo). The reasons being:

      1. Modems were slow (even slower than they are now).
      2. We all still used floppy disks.

      Demos were often exactly 1 floppy disk. The whole game was often many more.

      That, and the fact that the guys who made these games were totally awesome people and you didn't want them to go broke and stop making games. There was an actual cult of personality in shareware.. whereas retail games (as much back then as now) are made by big business who can go spin. That's the way the small-tribe-logic of the brain works.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
  3. Slashdotted? by dcollins · · Score: 4, Funny

    "My father still lives at the address where Potomac Computer Systems started up, so he still gets an order every few weeks... he's retired now, so he doesn't have much to do. Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders, put disks in them, and mail them out."

    Odds that his dad just got slashdotted?

    --
    We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
    1. Re:Slashdotted? by DavidTC · · Score: 5, Funny

      Slashdotted with money.

      --
      If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
  4. Re:Epic Rocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Haha, yes! Epic Pinball was awesome. It was the first video pinball game that I remember having good physics. The soundtrack was pretty badass too.

    If you're still into pinball, check out Future Pinball. It's a fully 3D representation of pinball that you can use to create your own tables or download a number of ones that other people have done.

  5. Re:Page 1: Find the programming language in Window by blazer1024 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's not like it's that hard to *get* a programming language for Windows, though.

    Just download a copy of Visual [C++|C#|VB] and you can do all kinds of fun stuff.

    Windows doesn't have a programming language at boot because it's an OS for the masses, and the masses would get confused by a "READY." prompt.

  6. Re:Epic Rocks by MachDelta · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Lets see, I remember... Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Dare to Dream, Solar Winds, Castle of the Winds, Highway Hunter, One Must Fall 2097, and Seek and Destroy... yup. Lots of time wasted on Epic Megagames stuff back in the day. And that's completely ignoring the fact that I was an Unreal Tournament (1/2/2.5/3) junkie for six or so years. Epic has definitely published and produced some memories for me.

  7. Re:ZZT (and other games!) by FreonTrip · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I remember playing Jill of the Jungle on a friend's 8 MHz Tandy 286, and being in awe that it scaled down so gracefully - my home PC ran with VGA graphics and 16-bit stereo audio, and his ran with CGA and PC speaker sound. The framerate was still perfectly reasonable too, except when one invoked the wrath of the bees. Out they'd swarm, devouring CPU time and chopping the framerate in half. Even now when we find some new computer-eating FPS we bitch about "a serious case of the lag bees" and laugh...

  8. Re:Page 1: Find the programming language in Window by Corngood · · Score: 3, Informative

    They probably just need the C++ runtime:

    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf

    There's a separate download for x64, but express won't usually target that.