The first PC game I ever properly owned, I did not actually own at all. It came on a 3.5 inch floppy with KEEN written on the label in blue biro, handed over by my cousin brother, who got it from a friend, who got it off a magazine coverdisk, and not one person in that whole chain had paid a single rupee or a single dollar for it. And that was totally fine. That was really the whole idea.
If you grew up on DOS games you already know the screen I am talking about. You finish the last level of the free episode, you feel like a king for about four seconds, and then up pops a wall of text in that chunky DOS font telling you there are more episodes waiting, here is the price, here is an address in Texas, please send a cheque or money order. I must have read that order screen forty times. I knew the address better than my own school timetable.
That screen was shareware, and looking back it was one of the most honest deals gaming has ever offered anybody. I keep thinking about it every time some free app on my phone asks me for money in a way I can't quite follow, so here is where it came from, why it worked so well, where it really didn't, and where bits of it are still hanging around today.
A Man in Garland, Texas Had an Idea
The word shareware was already floating around the early PC scene, people put out little utilities and asked you to send something if you liked them, which mostly meant nobody sent anything. Scott Miller had tried that route with a couple of his own text adventures and the money was, to be honest with you, not enough to live on. So in 1987 he turned it around a bit. Working out of his parents' house in Garland, he started Apogee and put out [Kingdom of Kroz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroz), and instead of giving away the whole game and hoping people would feel generous, he gave away only the first part.
Finish that part and the game told you where to write for the rest. That was it. That was the trick! The free episode went up on bulletin boards, it spread by itself from modem to modem and floppy to floppy, and the players who loved it enough wrote to Texas for the remaining episodes. Kroz is usually credited as the game that started the whole first-episode-free, pay-for-the-rest pattern, and pretty soon other shareware publishers were doing the exact same thing.
Isn't that really simple? No account, no login, no ads popping up in between levels. A free game and a price tag sitting right next to each other where you could see both of them clearly.
How It Actually Reached Us
People who did not live through this find it hard to picture how slow and how human the whole distribution thing was. There was no store. You got games from a BBS if your family had a modem and did not mind the phone line being blocked for an hour, or from the coverdisk stuck on the front of a PC magazine, or most commonly from some older kid at school who had a shoebox of floppies with labels like GAMES 3 and DONT DELETE, and if you were lucky you stood a chance to walk home with two or three of them in your school bag.
We would sit in front of my uncle's 486 on a Sunday with a stack of those disks and just install whatever was on them. Half of it never ran. The other half needed you to fiddle with CONFIG.SYS and free up memory and pray the Sound Blaster was really on IRQ 5 like the setup screen claimed. But the good stuff, the Apogee stuff specially, always had that same order screen at the end, and you started to recognise it like a logo. Oh, this one is from them, this one will be good.
Keen, Fifteen Dollars and a Cheque in the Post
The game that made the model famous was Commander Keen. A small group of young programmers in Shreveport, Louisiana (the same lot who would soon call themselves id Software) had worked out how to make an ordinary PC scroll smoothly sideways like a Nintendo, which sounds like nothing now but back then it was really weird to see on a beige office machine. Apogee put out Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons on 14 December 1990, and episode one, Marooned on Mars, was free for anyone to copy.
Episodes two and three were sold seperate. Fifteen dollars each or thirty for the set, which from what I've read was double what Apogee had been asking for an episode before, because Miller could tell this one was different. Fifteen whole dollars! For a boy in class six in Coimbatore that was not a price, that was pie in the sky. So I never saw The Earth Explodes or Keen Must Die until years later, and I played Marooned on Mars so many times I could still tell you where every Yorp is standing and where you find each missing part of the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket, including the car battery, the vacuum cleaner and that bottle of Everclear my mother definitely did not need to hear about.
Then came Keen 4, Secret of the Oracle, the free half of the Goodbye, Galaxy! pair, and honestly this is the one that totally stole my heart away. The pogo stick, the old Council Members waiting to be rescued, the way Keen sits down and pulls out a book to read if you leave him standing too long. Really cool stuff for 1991. If you never played it, well then, you are in luck, because Commander Keen 4 is right here on Free Game Empire and runs in your browser, no boot disk required.
Then id Turned the Volume Right Up
By then the Shreveport lads had become id Software properly, and Apogee published their next big one on 5 May 1992. Wolfenstein 3D. One free episode of ten levels, five more you had to pay for, and very quickly every school computer lab on the planet seemed to have a copy hiding in some folder called WORK or HOMEWRK2. I am not even exaggerating. The teachers knew. Everybody knew.
And then Doom. On 10 December 1993 id put the shareware episode, Knee-Deep in the Dead, on an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin, and so many people tried to grab it at the same moment that the server more or less fell over under the weight. Picture that for a second. A free sample so wanted that it knocked over a university's network. No marketing budget in the world can buy you that.
Years later, in June 2015, Doom was among the very first six games inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York, alongside Pong, Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros. and World of Warcraft. Guinness World Records even lists that first batch as a record of its own, which I find really funny for a game most of us first met as a free download somebody's elder brother left on the family PC.
Why Episode One Always Felt Like the Best Bit
Here is a thing I only noticed when I got older. Episode one was nearly always the tightest, most carefully made part of the whole game, and it had to be. That free episode was the advert, the demo, the shop window and the salesman all rolled into one, and it had to win over a total stranger who got it from a friend of a friend with no box, no manual, no nothing. If episode one was boring, you never wrote to Texas. Simple as that.
So the developers put their best ideas right up front. Ask Doom fans which episode they remember most fondly and alot of them will say the first one, the hangar, the toxin refinery, the slime pits glowing green, even if the later paid episodes were harder. Harder is not the same as better.
There was a nice side effect to this that I think gets forgotten. Since the free part had to stand up on its own two feet, it was a complete little game in itself. It had a beginning, it had a boss, it had an ending screen. You were not getting a trial that locked itself after twenty minutes or a game where every second door wanted you to pay for a key. You got a real game, only shorter, and the order screen at the end was a polite knock on the door rather than a hand in your pocket.
The Honest Bit: Most of Us Never Paid
Here is the awkward part. I talk about that order screen like it was some kind of temple and I never once filled it in. Not for Keen, not for Wolfenstein, not for Doom. Fifteen dollars was a few hundred rupees back then, I had no cheque book, no clue how you even send money to Texas, and my cousin brother had the "full version" of nearly everything anyway, which let's just say did not come from Apogee. Most of the kids I knew were exactly the same. The whole model only worked because a small slice of players somewhere paid for all the rest of us, and the people making these games knew that and lived with it.
And shareware had its ugly corners too, no two ways about it. There was crippleware, where the free version had saving switched off or the sound ripped out. There were nag screens that made you wait and press a key before it would let you quit. There were mail-order catalogues charging a few dollars a disk for programs that were already free, and plenty of what came on those disks was really rubbish, half-finished things somebody uploaded on a slow Sunday. For every Keen there was a dozen games you played for two minutes and deleted.
So no, it was not some golden age where everybody was kind and every deal was fair. But the core of it, the bit that actually worked, was still honest. You could see what you got for free. You could see what the rest would cost. The price was a number written on the screen and it didn't change halfway through the game.
Where the Trick Lives On, On Your Phone
Fast forward thirty odd years and the first-episode-free idea is everywhere, only wearing different clothes. Free-to-play phone games are kind of its great grandchildren, except the price isn't on one honest screen at the end anymore, it is spread thin across gems and energy bars and timers and season passes, and you may possibly end up spending way more than fifteen dollars without ever once seeing a total. Not everybody went that way though. Lots of indie games on the app stores still give you the first chapter free and unlock the rest with one single payment, and every time I see that I get a little warm feeling, like spotting an old friend's handwriting on an envelope.
Mobile slots are a funny one in this story. In the UK the rules got stricter on 7 May 2019, and since then you have to prove you are 18 before you can even try the free play version of a slot game, which I honestly think is fair enough, those games are not meant for class six kids holding a floppy from their cousin. The money side is a totally different animal from shareware too. At Swift Casino the mobile slots open straight in the phone browser with nothing to install, everything from Book of Dead to Big Bass Bonanza, but these are real money games and not a free episode one, so the old Keen rule has to work backwards here. Decide your fifteen dollars before you start, treat it as the price of the evening, and when it is spent, that episode is over.
The Games That Finally Went Free
Weirdly, the story has a happy ending for a good few of those old paid episodes. Some developers simply gave their games away once the money stopped mattering. One Must Fall 2097, the robot fighting game Epic MegaGames published in October 1994, started out as shareware like everything else, and in February 1999 its makers declared the whole thing freeware. It is sitting in this site's top rated list as well, and it still holds the potential to eat a whole weekend if you are not careful.
Others got stuck in limbo. The companies folded, the rights got lost in some filing cabinet, and nobody could sell them anymore or was even sure who was allowed to give them away. That's the gap the abandonware sites and the stubborn fans stepped into, and the good ones, this site included, stick to games whose owners are long gone or that were put out as freeware or shareware to begin with. A lot of these games would simply be lost by now if a few people hadn't kept copying the disks, which is a little bit funny when you think about it, because copying the disks is exactly how they reached us in the first place. The games are doing the same thing to their own selves all over again, passing quietly from hand to hand.
A Few Quick Answers
Was shareware the same thing as a demo?
Not really. A demo was usually a level or two cut out of a game you were then meant to go buy in a shop. A shareware episode one was a complete little game with its own ending, and you were actively encouraged to copy it and hand it to your friends.
Did anyone actually make money from it?
Some did really well. Apogee grew from a business in a family home into a proper company on the back of Kroz, Keen and Wolfenstein, and went on to make Quake. But for every big name there were thousands of small shareware authors who got a handful of cheques and a few nice letters and that was about it.
Can I still play those free episodes now?
Yes, plenty of them. Most shareware episodes were always meant to be passed around, so a lot of them are still easily available, and browser emulation means you don't need to fight with HIMEM.SYS the way we used to. Keen 4 is one click away on this site, which is way more fun than hunting down a working floppy drive in 2026.
What I Would Tell My Class Six Self
If I could go back and say one thing to that kid staring at the order screen, it would probably be this: the free episode was never really the trick. The trick was that they told you the price. Every game that respects you still does that in some way, and every game that doesn't, you can feel it in your stomach even if you can't put a name on it. So go play Marooned on Mars again sometime. Read the order screen right to the end. It still reads like a promise!
