I've previously talked about how demos were prominent in the "CD but no internet" era and the early internet era. These demos often were an interesting experience in and of themselves, such as the Dark Forces demo that has many secrets not present in the actual game. It doesn't hold a candle to the full retail product, but it can hold your interest for at least half an hour or so. More, if you are a kid obsessed with Star Wars who doesn't own any other shooters.
I'd like to go over some games that I remember playing in the day primarily through their demos.
To start with, obviously I had the Dark Forces demo. It wasn't until much, much later that I got the actual game. I had played Half Life 1 and 2, Serious Sam, and most DOOM variants before ever playing Kyle Katarn past finding the Death Star plans. This is is a game that I had seen other people play, but never had access to myself. The secrets actually confused me quite a bit. When I first got Dark Forces from GOG I thought I had lost my mind when the secrets listed in the previous article did not appear in the actual game. I thought for a while that either I imagined everything (it happens!) or that the secrets were a lot harder to find than I remembered. It's not until I found the old demo CD and installed it through DOS Box. Conversely, there is a secret in the actual game where an Ewok appears in the first level, but this does not appear in the demo. Not that it stopped me from trying to find it in the demo.
I got the actual demo from an eight CD demo pack. It had "not for individual resale" plastered over it, but that didn't stop the vendor at the fair from selling it to me. The disc also had a demo of Full Throttle on it (NOT the full game, as I mention in the Dark Forces article.) This is a very short demo which covers only the very introduction and a much later section of the game where you need to get a ramp for a jump. This also threw me off when I finally got Full Throttle, as the story goes in a very different way after the introduction. Most of the rest of the collection consisted of non-playable demos, meaning basically a trailer. Kind of waste for a whole CD, but CDs were cheap. The only other playable Demo was for Journeyman Project 2.
This demo was pretty extensive, practically serving as disc 2 of 3 of the original game. This meant that it included the intro, Gage's apartment and the Farnsworth Space Station time period. The game consists of four time periods plus a finale segment (meaning 6 "zones" counting the apartment hub). Due to the way the demo is set up you can only do half of the activities in the Farnsworth zone, meaning that the demo covered about 1.5/6 = 25% of the game. Not too shabby. One thing that the demo also really made me appreciate how detailed the apartment is. There are lots of nooks and crannies with bits of information in them, and the future TV is a well of information. All you really need in the game from it is to watch a couple of news stories giving you the general context of the story, plus two commericials that you need to use to buy products to solve puzzles. However, there are more videos to watch, and these are followed by text reports which in turn have highlighted links you can click to get a practical wiki. This involves a huge amount of information, including information on all the alien species and their opinions on time travel (even though only two of them actually affect the story.) To be honest if I owned the whole game, I probably would have ignored this stuff, but when you are a kid desparate for content you will delve into whatever you can actually gain access to. It's a whole nother article, but I do wonder how the easy access to free and cheap games affects how younger kids approach gaming as a whole, since they never had the limited supply that leads to ultra-spergery.
The Journeyman Project 2 demo actually helped out later in an unexpected way. I eventually got the Journeyman Project collection for the first three games. However, this was a defective collection because they printed two copies of disk 1. One disk said that it was disk 2 on it, but if you looked at the files it was identical in content to disk 1. Thus the game wouldn't recognize it. This is a bigger problem than you might think, as disk 2 contains the information for Gage's apartment, which is where the game starts, meaning you couldn't do anything at all. However, the demo had the ability to save a real save game when you got to the end, and I could load this into the actual JP2 to continue playing, provided I didn't go back to Gage's apartment or the Farnsworth Space Station. You have to do both to complete the game, so I couldn't beat it, but at least I could get some value out of the defective product. (If you're wondering why I didn't just return the game or get a fixed version, the publisher went out of business shortly after I bought the collection. And unfortunately while the demo disk contained basically the same files as disk 2 of the actual game, the game wouldn't read it as such so I couldn't fix things that way either.)
Those two demos came from an actual purchase. There was shareware stuff like that you could get in stores; for example I got a very limited demo of Warcraft 2 for like a buck (three short maps for each side.) What was more exciting to younger me were the stuff that came on the disks themselves. I mention in this essay that it was common in the early CD era for companies to stuff a bunch of demos on disks, making this stuff easy to find. Sometimes it was just a video, like the trailer for In the First Degree that came with Myst. Other times it was playable. For example, Sim Tower came with (among other things) a demo for the game creation program Klik and Play. It was very limited: you could only have one screen and you couldn't use the pseudo-programming "event editor" but instead were limited to declaring what happens as events pop up in gameplay. As kids, we still ended up making many games on this. Just the notion of being able to make your own game was so enticing that we could look past the limitations. The game creation became almost a game in and of itself.
How it would work is that you would make some basic objects and then determine their movement type (ex. completely static, moving along a predetermined path, affected by simple physics and gravity, or player controlled in some way.) Then you would run some gameplay. When an "event" occurred, such as two objects overlapping or the player pressing a button, it would freeze and ask you how to interpret this event. For example, you might say that the fire button should make the player shoot a projectile or that contact with the ground should stop the player. There would be a plethora of events at the beginning since the game wouldn't even know things like that you shouldn't pass through ground or that enemies should hurt you. After a bit you'd get a relatively stable game, until something unexpected happened. We would often choose to have something wild happen for rare events, like spawning entirely new player entities or having enemies explode. This in turn would create new unexpected events. You would then turn this over to a friend who would play your "game" (really just a set of bizarre interactions) until he got to something you hadn't expected and add his own quirks. The end product was never well designed from a gameplay perspective, but the experience was fun, and something we could only do because of the demo. (Not that I didn't have fun playing Sim Tower as well.)
Someitmes I have vague memories of games that I've only seen through the demos. In some cases those games become available through GOG or whatnot, and I get to play them later. This happened with Descent and Missionforce: Cyberstorm, for instance. Othertimes I encounter them again when going through old CDs. For example, for years I had a vague memory of some adventure game based around Greek Myth that used FMV and digitized actors. I remembered a demo where you have to sail through the Clashing Rocks that Jason and the Argonauts went through. But I had no idea what the hell the game was beyond that. Searching for "Ancient Greek Adventure Game" is too vague to expect much in the way of results, even if searches weren't broken. It turns out that this is another game whose demo appeared with SimTower, and the name of the game is "Wrath of the Gods." There's another game in this category that I only vaguely remember. It was a Civilization-like game where you built cities, roads and such. It wasn't a civilization game, and it wasn't the "Advanced Civilization" adapation of the board game. I remember in the demo that you could only choose to be the Egyptians (lead by Nefertiti) or the Romans (probably led by one of the Casesars.) Presumably there were more options in the full game. Each faction had one unique unit... and that's about all that I remember. There's no way that I'm going to encounter this thing again unless I happen upon the CD that had it as a demo. But I do remember having some fun afternoons playing through it, even if the options were rather limited.
In many cases the demo would only be a short preview video. The teaser for Day of the Tentacle still sticks out in my mind, as does the one for Inca. To this day I still have no idea what the hell kind of game Inca is, though my impression from hearing it discussed elsewhere is that it was rather gonzo. I'm pretty sure that this is the video I saw back in the day; at the very least the flying pan flutes matches up. You tell me what the hell is going on. But even stuff like this was still fascinating for my young self. To put yourself in the proper mindset you have to realize that at the time we had no access to the internet outside of libraries, and you couldn't stream videos online anyway. So just having the ability to watch a video at all on the computer was interesting. This was also why I loved seeing stuff like this this Journeyman Project 2 making of video. The image was that blurry back in the day, but just seeing it on a computer was amazing. If I had access to that Project A-ko hyperguide my brain would have exploded. When it came to teaser trailers in particular it tapped into that childish anticipation. Where you imagine how great something will be just from the few scraps that you have heard about it. A playable demo was of course much better, but even a trailer was interesting enough to me that I must have watched these videos five or six times each.
Here I've pretty much just focused on things that you could find on CDs for games in the Windows 3.1 and early Windows 95/98 era. Of course, later on we did get access to the internet and there were plenty of demos that I got at that point (even though they took forever to dowload on a phone modem.) The demos for Soul Reaver and Sword of the Stars particularly stand out to me. (The Sword of the Stars demo is interesting because it only gave you access to the smallest class of ship. I didn't realize until I played the full game much later how quickly you get the second class in the actual game, and how much it warps the gameplay to only have battles between the dinkiest ships.) However, there is something less magical about this era in that with access to the internet you could also just get free games. By that point the aforementioned Klik and Play had several sequels, including Click and Create and The Games Factory. These had many improvements over the original (most notably screen scrolling) and there were plenty of people who made their games in those engines availalbe for download. Of course, you could get Klik and Play games too. Sonic Boom (this one, not the more recent subseries) is probably the most famous example of such a game, since it seems to be the first Sonic the Hedgehog fangame uploaded to the internet. One that sticks in my mind is the "Smiley's Adventure" game series, which did about as much as you could do with Klik and Play before moving onto superior engines. You can find a lot of these games on kliktopia, though you'll have to go through some retro game shenanigans to get most of them to run. (For the very oldest Klik and Play games, using Windows 3.1 in DOS Box is probably your best option. Later releases will work better in Windows 95 or Windows 98, which I may talk about in the future.
The only demo from that era which really captures my memories is the one for GTA 2, which was installed covertly on many a school computer back in the day. What made this one interesting is that your character started with a bomb in his gut. This put a time limit on the game, which otherwise was pretty similar to the first city section in the actual game (I can't remember anything being overly gimped.) Of course, how you would play would be different since preservation wasn't an option. After the time limit ran out (I think it was five or ten minutes) you were going to explode. Thus it becamse more of an arcade experience: how much carnage can you do before your time is up? And remember, the game doesn't just end when the timer hits zero, but you explode, so try to make your bang do as much damage as possible. You can also try to get your corpse to end up somewhere cool, like the top of a building or in the river.
In any case with the internet era there was a bit less magic to demos. There were cool demos certainly, and if you were interested in a particular game of course you'd get the demo. But in the pre-internet era demos represented a new type of computer experience that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten. It kind of reminds me of stories that I have read of sailors in the old days. They would sail with a few books, which they would learn cover to cover, since there was no way to get new books en route. When they reached a new port any new book, or even just things like catalogs and brochures, would be viewed as great to go through just because options were limited. Demos played a similar role in the pre-internet era.
Another related topic is the shareware business model. Here you'd get a basically complete game, which also served as a demo for a longer game. DOOM is probably the most famous example of a game releasing under this model, with other examples including the early Duke Nukem games, Wolfenstein 3D, Inner Worlds, Commander Keen 1 and 4, Jazz Jackrabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Hugo's House of Horrors, and many more. These have some similarities to the demos I am talking about, in that you could easily obsess over the basic game without ever getting the full version. Hell, in the case of ZZT basically the entire community decided to do just that, since Tim Sweeney included the full edtior in the "demo." (I don't know if this was brilliant or idiotic; on the one hand it prevented people from registering when they could just play free fan content, on the other hand when he didn't do this for Super ZZT the resulting ame was far less popular.) However, when it comes to shareware games the developers definitely expected a significant part of the audience to only play the basic game. In some cases, like Space Cadet Pinball or some of the individually sold Epic Pinball tables, they might not have even realized there was a full game. Playing an outright demo was different; you were always aware that this was not meant to be a full experience, but you could enjoy it nevertheless. I'll probably talk about proper shareware episodes in a future essay.
That's enough reminiscing for now. I don't know how much of this is of interest to anyone but myself, in contrast to my normal essays (which are still niche but consist of more than just gushing about nostalgia, usually.) If I come across some interesting demos I'll certainly talk about them in the future, but for the moment hopefully you at least have an idea of why demos held a magic for kids when I grew up.
October 1, 2023