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My shareware games history book, Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet, is now on Kickstarter. We're looking to make up the shortfall in funding from the Unbound campaign, so if you backed on Unbound you do not need to back again. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vicreeves/shareware-heroes
The book is an attempt to chart the rise of the shareware marketing model (which re-shaped how software is sold and distributed) and to tell the stories of the people who made, published, and distributed shareware games.
That means lots of info and first-hand accounts of the early days of Epic, id, and Apogee/3D Realms — the companies that dominated the shareware scene in its 90s heyday — but also of influential titles like Hugo's House of Horrors and Captain Comic and Snood...
and big niche casual games like Gopher Golf and Pretty Good Solitaire. And of quirky games that barely anybody played. And amazing stuff on non-DOS/Windows systems like Amiga graphic adventure Grandad and the Quest for the Holey Vest.
I have a mega-thread that I'll try to return to soon of cool examples of shareware games here: https://twitter.com/MossRC/status/1049112822536269824
For those of you who remember the project from its early days, here's an update on what happened behind the scenes and why I was silent about it for a while (spoiler: I put it on hiatus after the Unbound campaign stalled). https://unbound.com/books/shareware-heroes/updates/an-announcement-and-an-update
Also, a note to any potential Kickstarter backers based somewhere that isn't in the UK, US, EU, Australia, or Canada: we can ship anywhere in the world, but the shipping costs vary widely. So if you just drop us a note we'll get your country added to the shipping options.
