I’m pretty sure Doom will be the most popular (and my pick too), but I’ll throw a shout-out to Epic Pinball; that Android table was the best one in the game anyway.
It’s a simple choice, really, considering how many hours I managed to invest as a kid:
Jazz Jackrabbit, Jetpack, and Combat Tanks.
Scorched Earth
Jesus, that’s a deep cut.
Quake was awesome, especially since you could play the online multiplayer from the free version.
We had to be memory experts back then. QEMM FTW!
To me, it was Raptor Call of Shadows, a very nice shmup where you could buy new weapons between missions
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.
Loved the Hugo games. The jungle one was probably my favorite up to the point where I needed to find out some trivia question about the name of some person’s dog before the time of Internet.
I spent more time with Police Quest, which was similar. I remember trying the Hugo Jungle Shareware multiple times and getting frustrated going back-and-forth, stuck.
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.
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours:
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)All great selections!
I was a fan of all of the Apogee platformers:
Commander Keen,
Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure,
Monster Bash
Also Lucasfilm games:
Loom,
Maniac Mansion
What a great time for PC gaming!
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.
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.
brave dwarves 1
The graphic design looks so much like Spelunky. Cool!
Realmz
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.
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 some game unfortunately titled “Worm” (snake clone) with MIDI and sound effects still stuck in my head to this day
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.
