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:
Jesus, that’s a deep cut.
Quake was awesome, especially since you could play the online multiplayer from the free version.
MY DUDE
Save 5 rounds of cash for a death’s head nuke
Shriek “Now tremble before Thor’s Hammer mortals!” to your friends seated around you
Press fire
Accidentally blow yourself up when the wind pushes it back in your direction 🤡
Hail to the King Baby (Duke Nukem 3d)
One Must Fall 2097
You just heard the lightning strike
The theme song is the shit
Kenny Chou! He also composed Zone 66 which is another awesome DOS game soundtrack.
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.
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)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.
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/
We got mario kart at home
I loved Whacky Wheels so much but recently put it on my Steamdeck and eh, it did not age well. Very choppy gameplay. But it still has a place in my heart.
I played a lot of 2 games that nobody I’ve spoken to has ever heard of: Mordor the depths of dejenol Exile escape from the pit Both were great, I think exile had been remade by the programmer with a different title too
There was a Mordor 2 shareware as well. The game never got a full release but laid the foundation for Demise: Rise of the Kutan (2000). The rights to the game were sold to Decklin and they released expansions Ascension (2016) and Revenge of the Tavern Keeper (2024). Demos for Demise and the expansions are available at https://www.decklinsdemise.com/
Found out the exile games are now distributed as freeware https://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile/winexile.html https://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/productsOld.html
ZZT, the game that launched Epic. Say, there’s gotta be a ZZT community somewhere on lemmy, right?
I didn’t realize anybody else had ever played that game. I downloaded that from AOL back when I was signing up for a free month trial every month from those CDs in the mail.
I was so addicted to ZZT back then! The player-made worlds were such a delight, and my slow-ass computer which choked on so many then-current games ran them without trouble.
Now I want to try it out again.
People are still making games using it! When I get a bit more free time I want to polish up and republish the ones I made.
I always wanted to play with the editor and make a game with it back then, but never got around to it. Perhaps it’s still not too late!
ZZT is officially freeware these days, too! The last original floppy was purchased about five years ago, and afterwards Sweeney declared the program officially free to use, though sadly not open-source. I believe it has been successfully decompiled for over a decade, though.
Sky Roads, Test Drive 2, Jill of the Jungle, Halloween Harry, Jetpack, so many great games that I played the hell out of their shareware versions.
Oh boy I loved Jetpack and Skyroads!
We used to play Sky Roads on the school computers all the time. Great game.
