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Epic's Sweeney On the PC Shareware Revolution
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.'"
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.
Slashdotted with money.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.