Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet

by Richard Moss

Shareware Heroes takes readers on a journey through a critical yet long overlooked chapter in video game history: the rise and eventual fall of the shareware model.

As commercial game distribution professionalised in the 1980s, independent creators with scant resources or contacts were squeezed out of the market. But not entirely. New technologies and distribution concepts were creating a hidden games publishing market – one that operated by different rules and that, at least for the first several years, had no powerful giants.

It was a land of opportunity and promise, and a glimpse of the digital-first future. This is the story of the games and developers who relied on nascent networking technologies combined with word-of-mouth marketing in an era before social media.

Building on deep archival research and featuring interviews with creators, developers and other heroes of the shareware age, Richard Moss – author of The Secret History of Mac Gaming – once again brings to light a forgotten but all too important era of game development.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Video Games, Technology, Games, Audiobook, Computers

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who grew up passing floppies around school and feverishly searching for ways to obtain the registered versions of the Commander Keen games without paying for them, this was an interesting look at the computer gaming culture that led to the rise and fall of shareware. No individual game receives a ton of coverage, and I was hoping for a bit more of the details around the technical advancements behind the games, but there's a lot of meat here about the original indie development scene and how a few developers were able to make a living writing the games I grew up with. Plus, there's Snood.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a larger discourse on computer history and software development it falls a little flat. Programmers who aren't men are pretty much absent from this book. Gamers and computer users who aren't men are also pretty much absent too. The two exceptions are a non-binary developer and a developer's mother.

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2023/comm...

[Jim Razinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was primed for this because… yeah, played a lot of these in the 1990s, and passed them on to my sons. One, 33 now, says he has One Must Fall: 2097 installed and still plays it. So I was quite happy I got a review copy of this from the publisher through LibraryThing. Mr. Moss has compiled an impressively comprehensive covering of his subtitle: “The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet.” The big names, small names, niche markets (“As beloved and successful as they were in the Mac shareware scene, neither Freeverse nor Ambrosia (nor Fantasoft for that matter) ever registered more than a blip in the larger PCshareware scene.”), Moss covers pretty much everything. Any fan of the era should really like this book. I have a few connections of interest only to me (I’ll share below), and a few highlights…

“Slowly but surely, however, as more people took an interest in computers, the idea that you could make money from software began to spread around the industry.
The seed of the idea was planted in 1975 by Microsoft (then styled Micro-Soft) co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who broke from hacker norms by making a deal with Altair to distribute their BASIC interpreter as a commercial product called Altair BASIC.
The hacker community resisted this effort to commercialise the industry, pirating the software en masse, but Gates persisted and Microsoft grew.”
{There were were rumors that MS tacitly endorsed piracy of the early Windows OS in order to get embedded. True or not, it worked.}

“[Scott Miller, Apogee] had been immersed in computer games for years. He'd discovered the medium while living in Australia in the mid-1970s when his high school got a Wang 2200, one of the world's first all-in-one microcomputers. Bewitched by the magic he saw on the screen, he'd spent every moment he could learning how to make simple BASIC games rendered in ASCII graphics. He had
painstakingly copied games from the pages of Creative Computing magazine, typing their code in line by line, until he knew how to create his own ideas from scratch, then he'd repeatedly sneaked back into school after hours to work on the machine uninterrupted.”
{Yes!!! Oh, I did the same (except sneaking back into school).}

“One day it occurred to him that he should be trying to become a professional game developer, so he started to send proposals and demos to publishers with ideas he thought hey'd like. None took him on. He was a college dropout with no industry experience (other than writing about games, which counted for nothing), and the sorts of games he was making didn’t appeal to them anyway.”
{I dropped out. And I was a good coder who didn’t have a degree. I was rejected many times. I was told to “go get a degree and come back.” I moved on to other things.”

Connections:

- I have a friend who was friends with Terry Ramstetter, of Public Brand Software.
- I am a tad embarrassed to admit that not only did I live for 14 years within 15 miles of both of id Games’ Mesquite, TX, then Richardson, TX headquarters and never dropped in for a visit, but I never knew I lived in the same city as Apogee Entertainment (formerly Apogee Systems)… Rowlett.
- I wrote (assembly language) games in the early 1980s for a company that was marketing Timex Sinclair ZX81 software. They had intended to publish some as shareware, but folded. Or so I thought. I’d submitted a Mastermind game that didn’t just give clues to your guesses, but flipped sides and guessed your color code itself. I also created a primitive first person 3D maze that users walked through to solve. A year later, I saw my maze and Mastermind programs on a shelf in a retail shop 500 miles away. No credit, no royalties. No care. I’d moved on (and the ZX80/81 market was already dead.)

As I said, any fan of the era should really like this book.

[Andrew Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Shareware Heroes: The Renegades Who Redefined Gaming at the Dawn of the Internet” provides a thorough history of the shareware phenomenon. The audiobook version suffers from several recording errors, and the text itself could have benefited from more rigorous editing. Although the book preserves the legacy of an important era in gaming history, it ultimately reads more like a list of companies than a cohesive narrative. I think I would have preferred the content presented as a long article in a magazine instead of a full-length book.

[Zach Koenig · Rating 2 out of 5]

I grew up playing all the old Shareware PC games, so this book seemed directly targeted to me. I quickly discovered, however, that it tackles the issue from very much a hardware/distribution angle (not the games themselves)--which is not what I was expecting.

"Shareware Heroes" tells the story of 1980s and early-90s PC software (games, most notably) that was distributed freely--if sometimes incompletely--and then requesting payment. An interesting business model, to be sure, in the early days of PC gaming.

I wish that author Richard Moss had told the story through the lens of the games themselves, as that is what drew me to this tome and, quite frankly, I think it would have drawn in an expanded audience overly. Instead, Moss very much focuses on the hardware components of Shareware and its distribution. Blurbs about the games are of course mentioned, but that is not the focus here.

As such, "Shareware Heroes" is far more geared towards tech hardware junkies and amateur tech historians--not necessarily gamers or 90s nostalgics. I have no doubt the information is solid and fascinating to those groups, but for me I began skimming after 30-40 pages and can't really say I "read" the entire book.

[Umbet · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read if you remember that time period with any curiosity. Some of the individual stories start sounding the same after a while, but I still value the effort. Happy to see a brief mention of Wizardy (Apple2) and Wacky Wheels (486) - a game I regret not registering while a poor college student.

I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars; If you send me a postcard, I'll bump it up to 4 stars :)

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even growing up when shareware was in its heyday, the whole business model was always something that largely flew under my radar. My father did have a subscription to some monthly shareware collection or another, and it was fun poking around at the games on each disk they sent us, but I don't think we bought any of it. Maybe WinZip. Still, it was neat to see what was out there in that field.

Shareware Heroes fills in a lot of the history behind some of the games I saw (and a lot I didn't), but never fully owned. From heavy hitters like Doom, to astoundingly successful solitaire collections, this book is a pretty thorough trip through the history of the games, people, and companies that carved a niche for themselves long before services like Steam would normalize the digital distribution business model. It's fascinating, seeing this hidden side of gaming that even managed to produce companies that are still relevant today, like id Software and Epic Games. But even the underdogs who only made one or two shareware games have interesting stories to tell.

[Hay · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this book, Richard Moss explores the phenomenon of shareware, software that was distributed via Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and the internet in the early 1990s, instead of through cardboard boxes in stores. Moss clearly did his research but unfortunately has failed to create a coherent narrative. Every obscure programmer and game apparently had to be included in this book, heavily detracting from its readability. Additionally, the most important titles have already been better described in other books, such as Masters of Doom (about the history of DOOM and other id Software titles). Even if you're interested in this subject (I would definitely be the target audience, growing up with many of the games mentioned), I would not recommend it. Perhaps it is useful as a reference work or if you're looking for an overview of obscure games from this period.

[Fedogo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow I loved this! For years I've been trying to remake my childhood memories by searching for old programs. Old software, vintage software, retro games. These search terms were throwing up the most random stuff that were not what I was looking for. Shareware collection, of course! It's all there. These titles they seem familiar, they are! Now the memories are coming to surface. The magazines, the shareware CD's being sold in retail shops. Apogee, id, Interplay and so many more. One by one each name brings up moments of the golden age of gaming. After so much time I finally hear the stories of development. Who my heroes were and the sacrifices they made. Great read. Took me a couple days to finish it but I'm glad I did.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book on the history of PC gaming, particularly valuable to those who lived at least part of the shareware era and have fond memories of it. The narrative is consistent, and the information is accurate. I do feel like it is a little too concise... there were clearly more stories to be told and a bigger geographic scope to be studied. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for keeping a work smaller rather than bloating it, so this is more a matter of preference at the end of the day.

[KMT · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good book that sheds light on a now mostly-forgotten movement from the late 1980s to mid-1990s which laid the foundations for the rise indie games a few years later. Well-researched, especially on the business/marketing side of things and entertaining. It's understandably primarily focused on the US and UK, but I wish there had been a bit more information on the shareware authors from the rest of the world too.

[Andy Parkes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I backed this on Kickstarter and finally have gotten around to reading it!

I'm old enough to have gone through the Shareware era but not old enough that a know lots about it's history. This was a superb insight into the people, companies and their games that made shareware a thing. Also very enjoyable hearing about some of the games I loved from the time. Superbly researched and a great read

[Pian · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who did not grow up with many games, let alone shareware games, I must admit I enjoy reading this book very much. I was mainly drawn to the business side of shareware - the economics and marketing, but stories of both big and small heroes and their game development make it whole!

[Rob Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched and informative about the rise and normalization of shareware. Nostalgic trip, for someone of my age. I lived through this and remembered a lot of the titles and companies, though some were new to me as well.

[Michael Goodine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic account of the rise and fall of the shareware model of distributing shareware. The main focus is on the business model, of course, but there is just enough about the software itself (games, for the most part) to evoke pangs of nostalgia in readers who lived through it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kids today playing Fork Knife or whatever have no idea how good gamez were in the 90s.

[Tristan Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastically written book delving into the Shareware world, a must read for any gamer interested in gaming history.

[Petty Lisbon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was interesting but I didn't know enough about the topic before I started it.

[Scott Jann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great history of shareware games, recommended for anyone who is interested in the history of that time of computing.

[William Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reads like a school history book with lots of names, dates, etc., but no story to tie everything together. Put it down after 70 pages. Not worth finishing.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a very niche area and having read the book I’m not entirely sure it was worth writing about. It is well written but other than ID software, epic games, apogee, everything else is very minor.