Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
22 points by classichasclass
22 points by classichasclass
In case anyone else was wondering, I just checked my full/registered Quake CD and it doesn't have any of these extras on it.
$9.99 for a shareware release sounds expensive but it’s worth remembering that CDs were expensive to produce in the early days. So were floppy disks: a 22 MB game probably cost less to distribute on CD than floppies, but still a big chunk of that $9.99 is going to the media.
I can’t remember when magazines started getting cover CDs as an alternative option to cover disks, but I remember a bunch of the, charging £1 more. And then scrabbling around to find loads of stuff to fill up the disk with (any shareware they could get, and occasionally accidental malware). My home Internet connection took about 10 minutes to download 1 MiB in this era, so a 10 MiB thing on a cover CD was a big time (and money: it cost 1p/minute to dial my ISP!) saver.
The story here is fascinating, but it also highlights how impressive Quake was as a platform. A few years later, one magazine did a cover CD of the best Quake mods, and the CD was full. The base game was a tiny fraction of the total.
loads of stuff to fill up the disk
I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in France, porn was very often part of that stuff. Usually (maybe always?) "protected", meaning you had to use your Minitel and call some expensive service to get a password to unlock the goods. Sometimes it was just "hidden files", and young teenager pseudo-hacker me was very proud of having beat that security, amazing my friends. Sometimes it was properly encrypted and I was not gifted enough to even have the slightest idea of how breaking that would be possible, despite reading Pirates Mag to look very smart and edgy.