What was your favorite shareware game?

Hail to the King Baby (Duke Nukem 3d)

I'm getting flashbacks

One Must Fall 2097

You just heard the lightning strike

The theme song is the shit

https://youtu.be/1FA6UdL7-ls
- Man. I love that game. Still fire it up every so often. That sequel was also an early example of just how terrible a sequel can be. So disappointing.
- Kenny Chou! He also composed Zone 66 which is another awesome DOS game soundtrack.
So good. I wish OpenOMF matures soon.

Oh, I just remembered Castle of the Winds, too. What a great era for games!

I got my ass handed to me by Castle of the Winds when I was a kid. And that doofy-ass default barbarian sprite...

We always called that one Castle Of The Windows, since the entire game engine is constructed of 32x32 pixel Windows icons.
Native Windows UI controls for a game. Classic.
came here to post this. my buddy had it and i still play it every couple of years.
Castle of the Winds 1 and 2 were incredible!
Wow what a throwback. I feel like i was always getting cursed and poisoned. Now i feel the need to find this game and finish it.

Duke Nukem 3D probably. That or Rise of The Triad.

I eventually bought DN in the 90s and played the shit out of it.

RoTT WAS SO FUN! How about heretic, another Doom clone? The chicken weapon was a favorite of mine.
- Heretic 1 and 2 were great fun

Commander Keen is probably the one that I liked the most that is also well known.

My personal favorite was Bass Class, which is weird because I've zero interest in real-life fishing, then or now.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows

Might be pushing the limits of shareware, but the demo of Quake 1 on cd for a buck. A simple console command unlocked the full version.

ZZT, the game that launched Epic. Say, there's gotta be a ZZT community somewhere on lemmy, right?

I didn't realize anybody else had ever played that game. I downloaded that from AOL back when I was signing up for a free month trial every month from those CDs in the mail.
- There's a whole community around self-made games using the editor that came with it, including a website full of games and a forum. A few years back one of us published a book about the community (and how we all turned out trans).
I was so addicted to ZZT back then! The player-made worlds were such a delight, and my slow-ass computer which choked on so many then-current games ran them without trouble.

Now I want to try it out again.
- People are still making games using it! When I get a bit more free time I want to polish up and republish the ones I made.

Commander Keen!

Jumping around with the pogo stick in Keen 6 was so much fun. I recently found the full game. Was surprised how hard that factory level was. But the music was still how I remembered it.

Tyrian

A couple of people have mentioned Raptor: Call of the shadows, which was an absolute favorite of mine. Skyforce Reloaded is pretty close in terms of gameplay. I wish there were more games out there like Raptor

Probably Rise of the Triad.

Pretty sure I even bought the full game and never ended up getting very far. I also remember spending a little chunk of time on Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom, but could never figure it out enough to progress very far.

Edit: Another one I was trying to recall, the name was H.U.R.L.

Escape Velocity and its sequels.

Geez, I'd forgotten about that game. I spent an unreasonable amount of time playing those.
- Time to sink into the next: Endless Sky (also @Azathoth@fedia.io)
- No such thing as unreasonable with those games because they were brilliant.

Shadow Warrior Who want-a some Wang?!

"I am da Shaddo wahdiyah. Lessuh fight!"
Memory unlocked

ITT: everyone had the same “500 games on two CDs!” Shareware compilation CDs that I had growing up.

Or we are old enough to remember them the first time around vs reruns.

"Stars!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!

A 4X game for Win 3.11 that was set up for multi-player by email and ftp turbo.

Fantastically ergonomic use of early GUI features.

You could design your own alien race and ships, the default races were well balanced, but all played very differently.

Want a fun piece of trivia? Epic Pinball launched Digital Extremes, the developer behind Warframe.

And is named Epic because of Epic (Mega)Games

Wolfenstein 3d, and commander Keen

I spent so many hours as a kid on my dad's Thinkpad playing Gravity Well. It came on one of those "50 Great Games" CDs or something like that. The goal is to claim all the planets in the system, which you do by simply landing on them, then building defenses against your opponents. It's so much fun because your ship has pretty realistic inertia and the planets have actual gravity wells. The AI opponents can be quite difficult and aggressive. Challenging and fun, with great sound effects for the time!

This screenshot is from an Internet Archive page for the game, but I'm pretty sure it's only the shareware version. I gotta check again when I get off work!

Edit: I'm 99% certain it's from this exact CD for anyone interested. I've never been able to find a full version unfortunately...

I forgot all about this game! My go-to strategy was to attack freighters from the other factions while they were in flight and force them to change sides. My space pirate empire was unstoppable!
- Yes!! And you could kind of cheese the game by pressing both fire buttons in rapid succession (down arrow and 'd' I think). I loved making passes around an enemy's planet and staying just ahead of their defenses, and becoming basically an A-10 Warthog in space. It was kind of difficult since your bullets inherited your velocity so you had to shoot at weird angles 😁
That sounds fantastic, I might have to give it a shot.

Mordor 1 The Depths of Dejenol

still available from Decklins Demise

Its the game that got me into dungeon crawlers particularly Demise: Rise of the Ku'Tan, and the epxansions Ascension and Revenge of the Tavern Keeper

To me, it was Raptor Call of Shadows, a very nice shmup where you could buy new weapons between missions

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold

My first FPS and an excellent one. Sooo many hidden rooms and insane enemies.

Apogee was on fire during that whole era

I've been trying to remember the name of this game for ages. Thank you!!!
- Such a gem... Oh go on then, I will revive my dosbox and play it all evening. You've twisted my arm :-P

I spent a lot of time playing Raptor: Call of the Shadows, a vertically-scrolling shooter with an upgrade system.

There was also Rise of the Triad, a pretty decent Doom-clone

I was a huge fan of Solar Winds: The Escape. Cool plot, aliens, dogfights, ship systems management, evil shadow governments, rebels.... what's not to love? It was my introduction to the genre and will always hold a special place

I'm so stoked to see this here. It was my first thought when I saw the thread.

It was a stand out experience from my childhood.
- For real though, I'd love to see a modern take on this - something in between NMS, Mechwarrior, and FTL. I've not found anything out there with the correct combination of exploration, ship customization and management, and sinister plot. Several games get closer, but they're all missing something
Oh my gawd. I was reading the comment above yours when Solar Winds popped into my head. Then I scroll down to see this. Bless you.

Pinball Fantasies, Raptor, Heretic

I played a lot of TetriNET and Subspace Continuum with my old online community. Great times.

More detail edit: TetriNET walked so Tetris 99 could run. Version 1 does not install on Windows anymore (but has a Linux version). Version 2 works, complete with its archaic user registration that asks for too many details.

Continuum is a large PvP arena Asteroids-like 2D space shooter. It's on Steam now. Starts tough to control and with a high skill ceiling, so be wary of the veterans. The Death Star Battle map is a blast with a big group. It feels like trying to speed through a narrow maze on bumper boats during a huge battle.

Oh I'd forgotten about Subspace; what a classic!

Colobot - don't think it was "shareware" but it absolutely came as a demo on ceebot.com (still hosted there today I believe). Literally THE game that got me into computer programming and whatnot.

Otherwise for actual shareware, I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Crazy Gravity and The Worm (found it!)

I really wanted to play a couple shareware games called Jetpack Joyride, and Hot Chix n Gear Stix as a kid, but neither of them would play on my Windows XP netbook as they had a hard check for if you were on either Windows 95 or 98, even with compatibility mode.

Jazz Jackrabbit always crashed out on my 486 D: I wanted to play it so badly.
- Oh, would've been so frustrating! I remember having a Pentium 4 laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and that thing unsurprisingly cooked itself, so I then tried 1NSANE (Codemasters' soft body physics car game) on my crappy little netbook instead and it just couldn't handle it.
  
  It would be some time before I was gifted an Acer Aspire with dedicated graphics and a busted screen that I could play 1NSANE again

I've been playing some Jazz Jackrabbit and Duke Nukem 1, they are both great. I think I prefer the design of DOS games to the design of console games.

IndyCar Racing II

Damage simulation 😍

I can't tell you how many times I played the shareware version of Gazillionaire.

Great deal.

Doom, Wolf3d, Diablo, and Castle of the Winds

I think this question just fried my brain. I don’t even know where to start.

Most played shareware of all time though was probably Transport Tycoon.

Was It shareware? Didn't know it!

I'm still enjoying It with OpenTTD https://www.openttd.org/
- The original Transport Tycoon was distributed as shareware, would have been 95 or 96 when I was playing it off a shareware disc.
  
  Not sure if TTD got a shareware release too, but i got that one as a retail boxed version.
  
  But for 94 or 95 if you didn’t have a shareware version then your game was pretty much doomed.

So many great titles in the comments. I'll add a few of mine:

Jill of the Jungle
Zaxxon
Heretic (Doom clone)
Stellar 7 (can't recall if shareware or if I just shared it)

Heretic was more than a Doom clone, it was developed using a modified Doom engine with the participation of Doom developers. It was a clever game in its own right, adding a lot of fresh elements to the then-budding FPS genre.
I don't know if it was their SDK or what, but Epic's sound design in this era was so good. Jill of the Jungle still stands out to me for that.

Quake was awesome, especially since you could play the online multiplayer from the free version.

Jesus, that's a deep cut.

I was always struck by the similarity to the blue robot on that table to Cyborg from Rise of the Robots and I wonder if there was some cross-pollination there.

He's actually based on the genie from Aladdin

Oh my god.. epic pinball! I had completely forgotten about this!! Thanks for that hit of nostalgia =)

The music is just as great as you remember.

Monster Bash! It was one of the better-playing platformers on the PC back in the day and I loved the halloween aesthetic.

I played a lot of 2 games that nobody I've spoken to has ever heard of: Mordor the depths of dejenol Exile escape from the pit Both were great, I think exile had been remade by the programmer with a different title too

There was a Mordor 2 shareware as well. The game never got a full release but laid the foundation for Demise: Rise of the Kutan (2000). The rights to the game were sold to Decklin and they released expansions Ascension (2016) and Revenge of the Tavern Keeper (2024). Demos for Demise and the expansions are available at https://www.decklinsdemise.com/

Found out the exile games are now distributed as freeware https://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile/winexile.html https://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/productsOld.html
- Wow, that's awesome, thanks!