dosgame.club is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
dosgame.club is the fediverse home of <a href="https://dosgameclub.com">DOS Game Club</a>. People here are all in one way or another involved with retro computing or retro gaming.

Administered by:

Server stats:

29
active users

Available today in the US and Canada in paperback and Kindle format — my latest book, *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet*, delves into the 90s indie games scene and the rise of the shareware business model that presaged free-to-play.

I managed to pack in lots of dev stories, biz insights, and meta-narrative into this one. It covers the origins and early work of id Software, Epic (Mega)Games, Apogee/3D Realms, Ambrosia Software, Jeff Minter, and more, along with surprise hits such as Elasto Mania, Snood, Scorched Earth, etc, market failures like Star Quest 1, and quirky games like Grandad and the Quest for the Holey Vest, plus shareware distributors like TUCOWS and Public Brand Software, the UK licenceware and PD scene, the market shifts that happened as the big indie publishers emerged and then left the shareware scene, and more.

If you're wondering if it's worth buying, there's a thoughtful and fun article/review-ish thing over on Eurogamer: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-legacy-of-shareware-is-everywhere

And you can learn more and buy via sharewareheroes.com

@MossRC I've been reading it (slowly...the only speed at which I read) and it is fabulous. I grew up at the very tip of the tail end of shareware, so it's fascinating learning about all the history, the different shareware models, and all that.
It's a good book.

@lunarloony Thank you! That's great to hear. I missed a lot of the shareware stuff in my book when growing up, too, partly due to age (born in 87) but mostly down to having been Mac-only until my older brother got a Win3.1 laptop in the mid-90s. It was fascinating to dig into all of the earlier history during my research phase.
Lunar 🛸 ♾

@MossRC My childhood was an IBM Aptiva 2144 (think it had a 486DX2?) and a CD-ROM with a few shareware games on it. Most of my days were spent playing through the first episode of Jazz Jackrabbit over and over. That's pretty much the extent of my shareware experience!

@lunarloony That's a pretty good shareware game to get stuck with. I can relate, though — until we got dial-up internet around 1997-98, my shareware gaming experience was limited to the first episode of The Adventures of Robbo and the same eight or nine unregistered Mac games that I played over and over. (Then once we had internet I got my hands on a bunch more Mac-exclusive shareware as well as the first episode of Quake and a few commercial demos that I played on repeat.)