eBook - ePub

Shareware Heroes

Name: Shareware Heroes
Author: Richard Moss

The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet

Richard Moss

352 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Shareware Heroes

The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet

Richard Moss

Book details

Table of contents

Citations

About This Book

Shareware Heroes is a comprehensive, meticulously researched exploration of an important and too-long overlooked chapter in video game history

Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet takes readers on a journey, from the beginnings of the shareware model in the early 1980s, the origins of the concept, even the name itself, and the rise of shareware's major players – the likes of id Software, Apogee, and Epic MegaGames – through to the significance of shareware for the 'forgotten' systems – the Mac, Atari ST, Amiga – when commercial game publishers turned away from them.

This book also charts the emergence of commercial shareware distributors like Educorp and the BBS/newsgroup sharing culture. And it explores how shareware developers plugged gaps in the video gaming market by creating games in niche and neglected genres like vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-ups (e.g. Raptor and Tyrian ) or racing games (e.g. Wacky Wheels and Skunny Kart ) or RPGs ( God of Thunder and Realmz ), until finally, as the video game market again grew and shifted, and major publishers took control, how the shareware system faded into the background and fell from memory.

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Information

Publisher

Unbound

Year

2023

ISBN

9781800181106

Topic

Informatica

Subtopic

Programmazione di giochi

Cover
By the Same Author
Title
Special Thanks
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 An Experiment in Economics
Chapter 2 Copy That Floppy
Chapter 3 ‘Pizza and Beer’ Money
Chapter 4 Licenceware
Chapter 5 The Apogee Model
Chapter 6 Invasion of the Vorticons
Chapter 7 Epic MegaGames
Chapter 8 Experimental, Experiential Weirdness
Chapter 9 Ideas from the Deep
Chapter 10 Maelstrom
Chapter 11 DOOM
Chapter 12 Shareware Edition
Chapter 13 Pretty Good Shareware
Chapter 14 Fade Out
Coda – Free to Play
Developer Spotlights
Glossary
Index
Image Credits
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Supporters
Plates
Copyright