When I was a kid, all I wanted was to be treated as an adult.
That meant that I'd always tag along whenever my dad (or grandad) would go out to do something that sounded remarkably "grown-up" to my kiddie self, stuff like paying taxes, visiting the post office or attending political rallies (you know, the kind of junk that's sheer torture for me now). I'm sure that my willingness to put up with such grueling things earned me quite a few Brownie points with them, but the illusion quickly shattered as soon as we got to those places and I started displaying clear symptoms of being bored out of my mind.
Eventually they stopped taking me to those places, but I didn't mind... Mostly because they took me to the one place I actually wanted to go to: the newsstand.
It was far easier to pretend to be engrossed on what was going on there, as my eyes would dart from side to side and stop just long enough on the covers of famed newspapers such as "Página12", "La Nación ", "Le Monde" and "The New York Times" to feign interest, but it was all an act... what I was really after were those circular cardboard sleeves that had to be found among the endless seas of fashion magazines, monthly publications and sport journals. Spotting one was always a matter of great joy, as they meant tons of gaming for a really low price (but only if I could convince my dad or grandad to buy them for me).
I remember just how much fun it was to finally get one of those things installed on my home PC just to see the software included (packaging was almost nonexistent and they were usually "thrown-ins", independent of the magazine that housed them). Some of those things were really impressive and were actually my introduction to some of my favorite games ever, legendary stuff like Tomb Raider, Virtua Fighter, Heretic, Prince of Persia, SkyRoads, Test Drive 4 and, of course, my all-time favorite "Doom clone": Strife.
SkyRoads had a pretty generous demo in terms of how much it'd let you play for free... and because of that, it became a favorite whenever I had friends over. Pretty genius game I doubt I would otherwise have heard about.
I would spend hours playing those sharewares and demos with my sister, often making up stories on-the-fly about what was happening inside the screen, trying to come up with the most outlandish explanations for the situations the characters found themselves in as we played these often context-less games. We had a lot of fun coming up with reasons for which Lara Croft would throw herself in an icy wasteland full of tigers or why the guys on One Must Fall 2097 would duke it out inside giant robots. I once almost completely lost it when my sister decided to turn Test Drive 4 into a TV drama about some dude trying to make it to his anger management class, rear-ending and taking out every other driver on the road just to accomplish that goal.
It still pains me how much I didn't like this one when I finally got to play the full version, but the memories made on the demo guarantee that I will always remember it fondly.
That was actually the whole beauty of it: those games were all sharing disc space, so they couldn't even afford a cinematic, and it was up to us to fill in the blanks about what we were seeing. I think that I wouldn't remember these things nearly as fondly if it weren't for the fact that those disc-saving maneuvers turned into some of my most cherished, shared memories.
Of course, you never knew what you were getting yourself into when you got one of these discs (and while I will never deny that that was part of the charm, it wasn't without its risks)... one time my dad brought home a game that looked innocent enough and ended up being softcore porn disguised as a graphic adventure game. My mom was not amused, and the disc was promptly discarded.
Another time he managed to get a hold of the fakest one yet: a poorly-printed orange disc with a picture of Godzilla on the front and the promise to include "more than 500 games" on it. Of course, the disc didn't even approach that number of games (and it was actually the reason for which I learned the meaning of "Not Available" in English, as it was what the prompt said upon trying to play an empty slot), and I am convinced that my dad's paranoia was right with this one, as my system would start acting up as soon as we finished playing it... but the disc, shady as it was, was my introduction to Spear of Destiny and Super Karts, so I guess there's that.
Virtua Fighter's demo was almost insultingly limited in terms of gameplay, but it was also pure comedy... and a favorite late-night joy for me and my sister.
What's amusing to me is that, sometimes, these discs were the sources of some arguments back home, as my dad would enjoy a demo but insist that he wouldn't buy the full thing... not because a lack of money, but because he was convinced that the game wouldn't run on our PC regardless of if the demo did (and it always did). He also had this annoying belief that the games and applications were vessels to some sort of virus and forbade us from installing them on the PC, forcing us to use the "run" function instead (that meant that the games would launch, but that they couldn't make saves or anything). It was a massive tug-of-war over nothing, but I do think that he was right about at least some of those discs... some looked fishy and poorly-made, so I wouldn't put it past the manufacturers actually including spyware or something among the files.
But if you were to ask me about my favorite demo-related experience, I think that it was the time I got to play Caesar III for the first time.
I had never played anything so deeply engaging and I became addicted to it in a way that was foreign to me at a time when most of my games would end as soon as I ran out of lives or turned off the system. Unlike my buddies Mario and Sonic, my character on Caesar III was in it for the long haul and the whole thing just drew me in like a magnet as I managed to inch my way further and further with each extended playing session, dreading the moment when the demo would decide that I had already had my fun and it would pull the plug on the whole thing. I was so obsessed with my time as mayor of that Roman settlement in the middle of nowhere that I even started goshing over it in school, much to the disguised annoyance of my deskmate, Jessica, who played along and had the patience of a saint (thank you, Jess, you were a real one).
I'll never know for sure if this was a glitch or the game's way of telling me that playtime was over (literally and figuratively), but I remember how the screen would flicker and then my population would go down to zero after I had managed to unlock the Coliseum by painstakingly reaching hundreds of citizens in my community of Waffleland. I was so incredibly annoyed that I almost broke the disc (but, thankfully, I didn't).
Very few games got my imagination going as much as Caesar III did. Every time I played its demo I felt on top of the world.
Because I got internet soon after, I never really looked back on demos again... there was simply no need when the full thing could be obtained after maybe five clicks, but I would be lying if I said that I didn't at least enjoy my time browsing through the many discs that fell on my hands during those years. Getting to try apps like WinZip or Schedule+ for the first time after reading about them during my "offline" days was almost as fun and fulfilling as playing an all-time favorite for the first time, and the amount of play time I got from those demos only fired me up even more, even causing me to open up and speak to classmates more... because, hey, maybe someone had the full version of that one game whose demo had stolen my heart (which actually happened once).
And as silly as it is to be nostalgic for something that wasn't even meant to be played for long, I just can't help myself. They didn't just bridge a gap technologically, but also help me bond with my dad and sister at a time when we could barely be in the same room together. How could I not love those things after that?
What about you? What were your experiences with demo discs and Sharewares?
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. (Usually you didn't even need to pay postage to send them in, but even if you did, I think it was only like 15 cents for postage.)
