ZZT
To celebrate today's retro Tuesday I decided to dust off a DOS classic, ZZT. ZZT isn't one of those classic retro DOS games that garners a ton of critical acclaim like Commander Keen, Warcraft or Doom but that doesn't mean I don't look back on it fondly. As most DOS games at the time were moving on to CGA, EGA and the super-ultra-deluxe-epic VGA graphics, ZZT games lived entirely in ANSI. When ZZT came out, it wasn't entirely original as the ANSI style was pioneered in other games like The Kingdom of Kroz and others. I really enjoyed Kroz, but the quirky nature of the ZZT kept me coming back to it. Well that and they were all available as some form of shareware.
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I played a little ZZT back in the day. I had a hard time getting past the graphics, I'll admit, and that probably kept my relationship with the game shorter than it could have been.
You know what blows me away, though? "Shareware." That word conjures up images of Windows 3.1 and 3 1/2" floppy disks. I can't remember the last time I tweaked my system clock so that I'd have a few extra days of "free play" time. We still have free demos of games that you can distribute, then you pay to "unlock" the whole thing - when did we stop calling that "shareware"? Was it when we got comfortable enough with digital delivery and the Internet that we no longer rely on customers to "share" the demos? The mind boggles. :)
Yeah for sure. Shareware -> Demos was an odd thing for me too. I remember when disks were too small to transmit shareware so I started moving to game downloads on a site called Happy Puppy. It had "demos" and it was strange to hear that at first for certain.
Its seems demo's are pretty rare on PC and fairly common on the consoles. Well at least for triple A titles it seems that they are. I wonder if its that the price point is more reasonable or, since I have a job its not as much of a problem. Not to say I haven't played a demo then picked up the full meal deal, I did that with TL2 for certain.
But yeah, it used to be that all games would have a Shareware/demo copy and now... not so much.