[etherealmachine]

I guess you're not old enough to remember the original Quake, released with a shareware license where the first episode was free. Someone will probably come along and shake their fist at me, but if Quake isn't old-school, I don't know what is.

[swivelmaster]

I'll shake my fist :D

Id software pioneered the shareware model in 1990 with Commander Keen, six years before they used it in Quake.

In fact, Keen, Keen 4, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom all used a three-episode shareware structure where the first episode was free and the rest were considered the "full version."

Doom 2 did not use this structure because Doom itself was a good enough advertisement for it. id then used it again in Quake, but fully broke from it with Quake 2, which just had a demo with a few levels.

[fsloth]

ID most certainly did not pioneer the shareware model. Shareware as a model is nearly as old as the personal computer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware

[PhasmaFelis]

Technically correct, but the specific Apogee model of shareware (one free episode, two or more commercial episodes) was much more successful than the original model of distributing everything for free and politely asking people to pay for it; it was pioneered by Id's publisher Apogee.

[fsloth]

Ah, good point. I stand semi-corrected :)

[flukus]

This is the oldest I can think of, 1989 - Hugos House of Horrors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo's_House_of_Horrors

[PhasmaFelis]

Not Id, but Apogee, pioneered "the Apogee model" of shareware with the Kroz trilogy in 1987. Apogee published Id's Commander Keen and Wolfenstein games.

[sien]

Which is playable on the internet archive at

https://archive.org/details/1990SuperKrozTrilogy

[npongratz]

I thought of Kroz immediately when I saw yesterday's Unscii submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185932

http://pelulamu.net/unscii/

[swivelmaster]

Ah, yes, I forgot about this! Thanks for the correction!

[j2kun]

Commander Keen games were a staple of my early video game experience.

[godzillabrennus]

No reason to stop now: http://store.steampowered.com/app/9180/

They are available through steam.

[qwertyuiop924]

As a new player who tried these games... they don't hold up. I'm sorry, but without the nostalgia, it just isn't fun. Technically impressive? Yes. But not fun.

Personally, I don't think any of id's pre-DOOM games hold up well. But that could just be me...

[wapz]

Wow! I have to go back and play through these games. I really do wonder how hard the games will feel now that I'm a grown adult..

[fsloth]

Quake is referred to as 'old' now? But it came out only - oh darn, two decades ago. Man there are young adults there for whom real time 3D graphics on the PC have existed through their whole life. Ok, I feel older now :)

[fb03]

Whenever and wherever someone mentions Quake 1, there will be fists being shaken and bumped!

frantic, fluid gameplay, even on lousy hardware (heck, I started quaking on a 486 dx2 66 and it ran quite okay at 320x240), insane difficulty, clever map design and lots of secrets to be found... seriously, that game was soo frigging amazing.

Don't even get me started on multiplayer... although we old folks have played our share of deathmatches on Doom/Doom2 (Dwango, anyone?) or Duke Nukem 3D, it was really Quake 1 (together with the booming Internet) that started this whole frenzy. And oh boy, then QuakeWorld came and made it really playable at 300ms+ pings (28800 bauds dial-up!), then we got mods like Team Fortress, and from there it escalated.

o/ fistbump and thank you for the trip down the memory lane.

[matwood]

Can I just say hell yeah! Original Quake was awesome, then Quake World made dial up tolerable when playing online. Quake was also one of the very early high rez OpenGl games. I remember getting my first 3dfx Voodoo card and realizing at that moment that it was a turning point in gaming.

[fb03]

Dude, I got my 3dfx Monster 3D card, which could do glorious bilinear filtered 640x480@16bpp Quake 1, using a wrapper called Glide, remember that?

The funniest thing about that card was that it only could do 3D graphics, so you still needed a 2D video card for normal video output. Monster 3D came with a short vga-vga cable which you used to connect your 2D card's video output to the Monster 3D, and then its own video output to your actual monitor. When you ran something using 3D, it simply took over your monitor and shut down the previous card's signal eheheh

Good times!