I'm pretty sure Doom will be the most popular (and my pick too), but I'll throw a shout-out to Epic Pinball; that Android table was the best one in the game anyway.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Hail to the King Baby (Duke Nukem 3d)
Probably Rise of the Triad.
Pretty sure I even bought the full game and never ended up getting very far. I also remember spending a little chunk of time on Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom, but could never figure it out enough to progress very far.
Edit: Another one I was trying to recall, the name was H.U.R.L.
Loved the Hugo games. The jungle one was probably my favorite up to the point where I needed to find out some trivia question about the name of some person's dog before the time of Internet.
I spent more time with Police Quest, which was similar. I remember trying the Hugo Jungle Shareware multiple times and getting frustrated going back-and-forth, stuck.
It's a simple choice, really, considering how many hours I managed to invest as a kid:
Quake was awesome, especially since you could play the online multiplayer from the free version.
To me, it was Raptor Call of Shadows, a very nice shmup where you could buy new weapons between missions
We got mario kart at home
One Must Fall 2097
You just heard the lightning strike
The theme song is the shit
Kenny Chou! He also composed Zone 66 which is another awesome DOS game soundtrack.
The .mtm master himself.
Cool, I'll check it out, thanks for the recommendation! I don't think I ever played Zone 66.
Scorched Earth
Jesus, that's a deep cut.
Want a fun piece of trivia? Epic Pinball launched Digital Extremes, the developer behind Warframe.
And is named Epic because of Epic (Mega)Games
Jazz Jackrabbit, Jetpack, and Combat Tanks.
Commander Keen!
Jumping around with the pogo stick in Keen 6 was so much fun. I recently found the full game. Was surprised how hard that factory level was. But the music was still how I remembered it.
So many great titles in the comments. I'll add a few of mine:
Jill of the Jungle
Zaxxon
Heretic (Doom clone)
Stellar 7 (can't recall if shareware or if I just shared it)
Heretic was more than a Doom clone, it was developed using a modified Doom engine with the participation of Doom developers. It was a clever game in its own right, adding a lot of fresh elements to the then-budding FPS genre.
All great selections!
I was a fan of all of the Apogee platformers:
Commander Keen,
Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure,
Monster Bash
Also Lucasfilm games:
Loom,
Maniac Mansion
What a great time for PC gaming!
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We had to be memory experts back then. QEMM FTW!
"Stars!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!
A 4X game for Win 3.11 that was set up for multi-player by email and ftp turbo.
Fantastically ergonomic use of early GUI features.
You could design your own alien race and ships, the default races were well balanced, but all played very differently.
Oh my god.. epic pinball! I had completely forgotten about this!! Thanks for that hit of nostalgia =)
The music is just as great as you remember.
I think this question just fried my brain. I don’t even know where to start.
Most played shareware of all time though was probably Transport Tycoon.
Was It shareware? Didn't know it!
I'm still enjoying It with OpenTTD https://www.openttd.org/
The original Transport Tycoon was distributed as shareware, would have been 95 or 96 when I was playing it off a shareware disc.
Not sure if TTD got a shareware release too, but i got that one as a retail boxed version.
But for 94 or 95 if you didn’t have a shareware version then your game was pretty much doomed.
A couple of people have mentioned Raptor: Call of the shadows, which was an absolute favorite of mine. Skyforce Reloaded is pretty close in terms of gameplay. I wish there were more games out there like Raptor
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I spent a lot of time playing Raptor: Call of the Shadows, a vertically-scrolling shooter with an upgrade system.
There was also Rise of the Triad, a pretty decent Doom-clone
I actually bought the boxed version of the game on 4 separate 3.5" floppies :o
Was in a clearance bin at Toys R Us for like 5 bucks. I remember being so stoked to be able to buy all the different weapons they teased at the end of the shareware episode!
Colobot - don't think it was "shareware" but it absolutely came as a demo on ceebot.com (still hosted there today I believe). Literally THE game that got me into computer programming and whatnot.
Otherwise for actual shareware, I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Crazy Gravity and The Worm (found it!)
I really wanted to play a couple shareware games called Jetpack Joyride, and Hot Chix n Gear Stix as a kid, but neither of them would play on my Windows XP netbook as they had a hard check for if you were on either Windows 95 or 98, even with compatibility mode.
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I was a huge fan of Solar Winds: The Escape. Cool plot, aliens, dogfights, ship systems management, evil shadow governments, rebels.... what's not to love? It was my introduction to the genre and will always hold a special place
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I was always struck by the similarity to the blue robot on that table to Cyborg from Rise of the Robots and I wonder if there was some cross-pollination there.
He's actually based on the genie from Aladdin
Who want-a some Wang?!
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