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.
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.
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Don't get me wrong, the other are good too, but leave less impact on player. Didn't even finished Doom episodes, but maybe I just like Quake more. :)
@a1ba That is a normal shareware thing. Although Quake's 4th episode is my favorite.
@dosnostalgic Or you went to a dark, shady place on IRC somewhere & traded a copy for whatever you had that others might have wanted.
I did eventually pay for Quake later on, I should point out. At the time, however, that was difficult to do on a military E2 paycheck.
@ashortbusvet I mean, another way was to wait for the shareware CD to appear in stores (I think in August?,) buy it for $10, and then just download a copy of QCrack (available 10/08/96,) and you were all set.
@dosnostalgic At the time my wife & I were stationed in Brunswick, Maine. Wasn't much there at the time that carried any sort of tech, much less shareware CD's.
@ashortbusvet What I was mainly pointing out that on June 22nd of 1996, the officially celebrated date of Quake's release, there was no way to actually play the full version of the game because it didn't exist yet.