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Anatoly Shashkin💾

Happy birthday to the Internet SHAREWARE version of Quake! 🎂🎉🍾🥂
Remember, it was only 8 maps long. To get the full game you had to order it for $45 + $5 S&H (about $100 today) and wait for it to get finished and shipped to you.

7 comments
Tamitha

@dosnostalgic I played that Shareware for years, I think.

sj_zero
Quake was amazing, but compared to many games of the period it barely ran on anything. Doom engine and Build engine games ran like crap on a 386, but they still ran. Quake needed an FPU, so it needed at least a 486, and as I recall at least a solid 486DX.

Quake actually was the thing that got me into Linux for the first time, because I assumed the fancy new OS everyone was talking about might be able to run it where archaic MS-DOS could not. Of course today I know more about instruction sets and the like and realize how absurd that idea was, but at the time miracles were regularly happening on PCs (imagine how mind blowing something like nesticle or zsnes was!) so it felt like anything was possible.

Incidentally, that first Linux distribution I used was incredible. It lived in a dos directory and you ran a batch file it would replace the MS-DOS kernel with the Linux kernel. It was pretty DIY after that -- I don't think it had a package manager or anything so if you wanted to try to make something run you were digging.
Quake was amazing, but compared to many games of the period it barely ran on anything. Doom engine and Build engine games ran like crap on a 386, but they still ran. Quake needed an FPU, so it needed at least a 486, and as I recall at least a solid 486DX.
Troldann Arothin

@dosnostalgic I loved that old ASCII installer progress bar. It feels like the dumbest thing in the world to love, but it really impressed pre-teen me for some reason.

Yaroslav Khnygin

@dosnostalgic It's the only version I had for many years.

TSource Engine Query
@dosnostalgic it's fun how in Doom and Quake the best episode is the one that was distributed in shareware version.

Don't get me wrong, the other are good too, but leave impact on player. Didn't even finished Doom episodes, but maybe I just like Quake more. :)
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