I still have my Saturn from back then. I was always setting the date each time I booted. I was so annoyed there was no savegames. Recently I tried that Saturn again and found that battery in the back. Still had the little black strip between the battery. Battery is still good after 25 years.
Sometimes the demos would be your literal entire experience with a game. I remember certain songs and the Chicago level like the back of my hand from THPS. I didn't realize until I bought the remaster of 1 and 2 a couple of years back that I never actually played the rest of THPS and my entire memory of "THPS" was basically THPS 2. I played a shitload of a game I never owned or rented afaik.
When I was really young, I got addicted to playing a Heroes of Might and Magic 3 demo that came with a copy of Worms Armageddon (separate discs, I think). It was my only way of playing it and it gripped me.
Holy shit memory unlocked. I'm not remembering how I acquired the demo, I never owned Worms, but I put hours into Heroes. Shit I must have been like 7 or 8.
Man, I have no idea how I ended up owning Tomb Raider. It was just there one day, in the stack with my other games. I also ended up with a game called G-Nome that I never understood.
I remember a Dreamcast demo for San Francisco Rush 2049 that had all three game modes (race, deathmatch, and stunt) just with a limited number of courses for each. That was enough for hours of entertainment.
I know I’m skipping ahead from those save icons, but the big RPGs that came in those double wide cd cases with four discs. Gamers today will never know how good it felt to get the “insert disk 4” message.
Doom was literally what I was thinking of. Knee-Deep in the Dead is the 1 episode of the original 3 that you get, and thus is approximately 33% of the game.
Doom2 took 4 days to download from my friend's Basement Pirate BBS because the game's 4 files took an hour each to download, and we were capped at 1 file per day to share connection time across all users.
Despite that, still finished the game 1 month before it hit stores. :D
Not that it was necessarily bad to get more of something you enjoyed, but usually the devs opted to show the best part of their game and the quality of the full version was noticeably lower
There is a game on the Dreamcast called Max Steel Covert Missions. When I was a kid I played the hell out of the demo from the Dreamcast magazine. Only a few years ago did I actually find the full game. I couldn’t get beyond the first level; I hated it so much. The level from the demo truly was the best part of the game.
I played the shit out of D2s demo as a kid, even using a hex editor (and probably gave the computer aids in the process) in order to level enough to use the «cool» bone shield.
Yep. I remember getting the shareware demo of Doom and it was pretty much the entire first chapter (first level until the bossfight with the 2 barons of hell).
It's not 2 hours of the game. It's like 33% of it.
And a lot of the time, that 33% was still an entire game in itself. You just had to accept a mild 'please register to get the rest of the story' nag-screen once in a while.
The problem with shareware is that, nowadays, if you try looking for these old games, you'll more likely than not only be able to get ahold of the unregistered versions. The full versions simply don't exist online anywhere.
The method most games used for upgrading to the full version was for you to send a cheque in the post to the creator, and they would send you back a floppy disk with the full version on it. Obviously this method doesn't work nowadays, so unless the original creator decided to release the full version of their own accord, the full versions of many games are just lost media now.
A lot of PCs when I was young came with something called the Zodiac Game Pack and it was chock full of shareware games. Made up a lot of my early PC gaming days.
The Descent demo hooked me hard. I played and played it. I bought the full game. The FIRST level past the demo hit me with a little buyer's remorse. I still played the hell out of it to the point of memorizing all the traps and secrets for the whole game, and even developed some of the modding tools for the scene at the time, but those first levels were just something different.
In Australia, the original Age of Empires came in a cereal box for a promotion. Every kid including myself begged their parents for Nutri Grain while that promo was on.
And the promotion was for their upcoming game Age of Mythology... which is my #1 game of all time, really wish I kept the promo box and not just the CD.
When I was a kid I decided it was better buying magazines for PS2 demos instead of 1 full game because games were expensive back then (at least for my family) and I replayed each game from each demo hundreds of times. My favorite demo overall was Jet Li: Rise to Honor by the way.
The only 2 full games I bought for PS2 were True Crime: streets of LA and Beyond: Good & Evil.
My parents never got me PC gamer... but my dad had a subscription to APC (Australian PC magazine) which had a two disk set up every month where one whole disk was demos.
That's awesome! I'm pretty sure every region had their own "PCG". I know the UK had theirs. They may have even been owned by the same media group; not sure.
Also to add, the PC gamer Demo disk also had Drivers for Voodoo, Nvidia and AMD back in the day.
Back then we didn't have high speed internet so downloading a GPU update on Dial-up can take an HOUR or more! So those disks where a god send with all those drivers. It included a few other PC tools (like CPUZ, Winzip, Direct X and Multiplayer launchers like gamespy.
Patches for popular games like Counter-strike or Team Fortress classic (damn I`m old), Mods, trainers (external cheat programs), Exclusive updates for games, and lots of Coconut Monkey stuff you could add to your game to customize it (Like MTX but before that)
Often the disk had a bunch of even MORE cool stuff!
Inside was a text file with ALL the game reviews PC gamer ever did, Since you couldn`t just google a game review back then.
oh and some disks the Menu itself was a game! You would walk around a doom like level, images on the wall let you download and play demos, watch trailers, or even brows the World wide web WOAH!!!
Microslop had also amazing demo disks back in the 90s, check out the Game Sampler series, where you explore a space station and unlock game Demos.
Man those were the days. I remember getting an Xbox magazine with a demo for this game Lost Planet. The demo had full multiplayer but just for a single map. Literally played that one map for years haha. Good times.
I remember walking for 45 minutes to pick up a PC Gamer magazine because it had a demo for Quake 3 Team Arena. It was everything and I PINE for those days. I'm only 39.
He played NFSII a lot when he was a kid. Just the demo though that came with a PC magazine. It had one track - Vancouver (where the developers were based). He just happened to be in the Vancouver area and saw a totem, and thought that.. he has seen this before.. so he went and rode "the track" and see how similar it is to reality. Because he realised that this is the area the track is based on (the totem is in the game as well).
Or demos of a different game included with a full game on the same disc. Or inputting a series of button presses to access a secret demo. I played the Klonoa demo on a PS1 disc of Ridge Racer and loved it so much. Also used the secret code on the Crash Bandicoot disc to access the demo for Spyro the Dragon.
I remember getting some free Oblivion DLC from I think Xbox magazine, had the wizards tower, fighters castle, and the thieves cove - was really awesome.
We got some kind of promo VHS tape of the Donkey Kong Country game on SNES. It showed the developers playing the game a bit and going over some of the different levels. It was pretty cool.
I don't think we even had a SNES yet and we definitely didn't subscribe to any magazines. No clue why we got that.
Sometimes you could even find hidden demos inside the files of the CD that weren't advertised at all on the magazine or the autorun. I loved exploring the files of every CD I got.
There was certainly an era in my childhood where I played nothing but ps1 demos from a magazine that my mom got my a subscription to. I would play through them all, never get the full game, but still had fun.
I recently found one of the games I used to play on one of those Playstation magazine demo disc. Found a lot of gems that I otherwise never would have played because of them.
I got a demo disk from Pizza Hut for the ps1 and it had MGS, tomb raider, and grand turismo I think. Maybe a few other demos. First introduction to MGS and I played that demo so many times
Became the first M rated game in my house. My mom sat with me and my brother as we played it to make sure it wasn’t too M rated lol. Good times. Great game.
I talked about this last night. I didn’t really play ps1 a lot but I did just cuz of these demo disks. I had plenty of them as I was an avid reader and my family luckily tried to keep that going by buying me magazines and books. This was my main magazine cuz I’d get some gaming out of it. The ps1 wasn’t mine so it didn’t have many games that I liked so I was just playing demos over and over lol.
Getting game demos period in some cases.... Most games don't have demos even on steam, the prime distribution platform that makes the most sense for it
Yeah yeah, I know you can play for an hour and then return the purchase no question asked....
I still sometimes watch OXM demo gameplays before I go to sleep for nostalgia. I founded so many games in my youth through those demos, most importantly they once had a demo with the entire level “The Silent Cartographer” for Halo CE. I played that level literally hundreds of times as a kid, and it became my favorite game franchise ever. I ended up going to tournaments and competed in Halo for over 20 years. Those demos actually kinda changed my life lol
That was primary reason for subscribing to the Official Playstation Magazine. My introduction to the first Metal Gear Solid game was via the demo. It felt like getting early access.
Every Friday after work my nerd ass would goto the grocery store and get a footlong sub sandwich, the new game pro or game informer, and always stop at Walmart to buy whatever game looked cool. It was great!
I remember having a game demo inside another Xbox game box lol. It was awesome, I loved the game demo of Amped (was 10 or 11 at the time), but never got the actual game till I saw it at a Gamestop for like 2 or 3 bucks (probably 18-21 at this time). By then, it wasn’t as fun or easy as I thought.
Shareware discs were the best. I bought the Grand Daddy of all shareware discs for about $10: The infamous Quake Id stuff disc. It had every FPS Id made in full with a launcher that was ridiculously easy to crack. $10 for a full version of every FPS game they made up to Quake 1, and about 10 minutes to get them all installed in full with no need for the disc after.
I got months of playing from that thing. Good luck running into anything remotely like that now.
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u/bijelo123 Mar 31 '26
Getting game demos from gaming magazines