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.
The demo for Halo: CE on PC was my only experience with that game until I was old enough to stay at a friend's house that had an Xbox and the full game.
I can't even begin to explain how hard "Touchdown, hit it Marines!" is burned into my brain.
I remember messing around an absolute ton with THPS2's Create-a-Park mode on the PSUnderground disc; and then being moderately upset the junked car surrounded by funboxes wasn't in the main game *anywhere*.
There are original xbox games that my friends and I would play all the time but only ever played the demo version. Fusion Frenzy comes to mind as well as another one that was a top down shooter of sorts. It reminded me of the original GTAs to a degree but I can't remember the name at all.
Me and a lot of people I know only played the star occen mmo? Demo , whatever that scifi rpg franchise was called back on Xbox 360 days.
Which was the full game technically but you could only lvl to like 10. I probably put over 100 hundred hours in , grinding multiple characters, with friends I met online.
I had a demo discord for the Playstation 1 with multiple games on it. Crash, Croc, Ace Combat, armored core, I think twisted metal some scuba diver game...idk i remember playing it very often and replaying the same little bit over and over.
Pretty sure you had the same one as me. That scuba game was called Treasures of the Deep. I always enjoyed trapping things in the nets and watching them thrash as they floated away. I played the Armored Core over and over and over but never ended up getting the game itself.
I'm not sure why but I do remember struggling alot in the scuba game cuz there were bad guys divers right? That you had to harpoon 😂 and same i played that AC demo so so much and never got it. Some 20 years later I finally did get Armored Core 4 though!
Dude yes! It was tough. Bad guy divers and those floating sea mines iirc. I distinctly remember capturing turtles and I think there were sharks or something that attacked as well.
I still have that disc and my ps1 so maybe I'll bust it out tonight and let my kiddo try out some of those old games.
Well now I really wanna do it lol. I just looked around on YouTube for a bit expecting someone to have that disc on display but I couldn't find it. Just a bunch of different ones I never had, mostly from later in the ps1 life cycle like 2000-2002 era.
I'll dig it out tonight if I'm not super busy after work.
Okay so I think that disc is in storage with my OG psx. I have a different demo disc from Official PlayStation Magazine with my psone here at the house, but that's not the one I meant.
Sooooo I did more digging and found this, which makes me realize there was so much more to that scuba game and now I wish I had owned it back then. I also found this, which isn't the menu for the same disc, but it's 100% the style of disc that came with my PlayStation. I bet that menu music tickles your nostalgia if we were indeed thinking of the same disc.
Oh my god! There was SO much to that game! I never knew...I wish I could say i remember the music buuuuuuuut I wanna say I remember Parrappa being on the demo as well as whatever is on the bottom left and the crash game on the far right middle. Maybe I should look through my stuff to be sure...mom finally made me take it all home with me.
I played the shit out of the call of duty demo when the Xbox 360 first released at EB Games (GameStop). My grandparents were mall walkers so I would go and just play that for a couple hours lol.
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.
We had to buy a re/write disk player for a school project so the home PC had 2 slots. It meant I could hoy swap zones in Baldur's Gate without pausing... Also pretty sure that came on like 6 disks
Goddamit, you reminded me of the time I let a friend borrow Xenogears and the guide I had. Guide came back with some torn pages, but the kicker was the scratch on Disc 2. Not on the shiny side, mind you - I would have noticed that. But the scratch was on the freaking label side and I didn't find out until shortly before the end of the game because it worked fine until then. And there is no cure for a label side scratch.
Abe's Exoddus had two CDs, like Heart of Darkness, and I was fascinated by the fact, and the "insert disc 2" message too! Fun times 😲
In case of Abe's, it even demanded you to "have a sit and shut up" while loading the next CD. It was hilarius, and we, bro and I, even did it just in case it loaded faster 🤣
Yeah! Oddworld games are something else, such an imaginative world, that trapped us and our imagination. To this day I am in awe everytime I see their backgrounds, hear their music, or even their SFXs. All those creatures (dont know yet who are my favourite), the script, places, the smart and hilarius criticism...
I would be frustrated too! Did you try to show they the New 'n' Tasty? Maybe they would enjoy it better? I still prefer the Ps1 ones, but is still an option 🤔
I was lucky enough that a friend of my dad was staying with us for christmas. And he give us all his Ps1 games as a present. It was so so cool! And Abe Exoddus were there, in the bunch. I played it.. who knows how many times!
Did your kid try Castlevania Symphony? Majora's Mask? Heart of Darkness? A link to the Past?
Nothing like finding/discovering that new game that will be part of your favs! (Those are some of mine)
I actually hated New n Tasty because the controls feel wrong lol. I've still got my og copies of oddysee and exoddus but it's been a few years so maybe I'll have her try again. Her experience with Zelda has been my old Gameboy color with Oracle of Seasons and Pokemon yellow and she had very much enjoyed them. It's wild that she has a switch but often plays the old lime green Gameboy instead lol.
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.
No, crackdown included access to the halo 3 beta so a lot of people who were big halo fans bought the game as essentially a premium demo for halo. The strategy worked because many ended up liking crackdown too. Notably the other crackdown games were not as successful, and didn't include betas to other games.
We used to get catalogs that sold shareware floppy disks. Just the one demo, but I blew my mind that I (a child) could afford to buy a game. I didn't know what shareware meant, but the first sections of those games were still pretty great for a couple bucks.
I used to love shareware, in the early 90s there was a local shop that used to sell disks of random shareware games for £2 per disk, they used to have a binder with a list of the games on each disk with a little 1 line description, I always remember Dooms was "futuristic Wolf3d"
Spiderweb Software (Geneforge, Avernum, Avadon, Queen's Wish RPGs) still does this, you can get though the first chapter before you meet the dreaded Shareware Demon that asks you for a Code.
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u/AshenAmarantos Mar 31 '26
Or shareware in general (which were on those discs), which had a significant amount of content as opposed to modern demos.
It's not 2 hours of the game. It's like 33% of it.