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.
It's a simple choice, really, considering how many hours I managed to invest as a kid:
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.
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.
Man. I love that game. Still fire it up every so often. That sequel was also an early example of just how terrible a sequel can be. So disappointing.
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.
To me, it was Raptor Call of Shadows, a very nice shmup where you could buy new weapons between missions
ITT: everyone had the same “500 games on two CDs!” Shareware compilation CDs that I had growing up.
Or we are old enough to remember them the first time around vs reruns.
Jesus, that's a deep cut.
Quake was awesome, especially since you could play the online multiplayer from the free version.
Oh, I just remembered Castle of the Winds, too. What a great era for games!
came here to post this. my buddy had it and i still play it every couple of years.
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
Jazz Jackrabbit, Jetpack, and Combat Tanks.
Duke Nukem 3D probably. That or Rise of The Triad.
I eventually bought DN in the 90s and played the shit out of it.
RoTT WAS SO FUN! How about heretic, another Doom clone? The chicken weapon was a favorite of mine.
Scorched Earth
Commander Keen is probably the one that I liked the most that is also well known.
My personal favorite was Bass Class, which is weird because I've zero interest in real-life fishing, then or now.
Raptor: Call of the Shadows
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.
I don't know if it was their SDK or what, but Epic's sound design in this era was so good. Jill of the Jungle still stands out to me for that.
"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.
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
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.
ZZT, the game that launched Epic. Say, there's gotta be a ZZT community somewhere on lemmy, right?
I was so addicted to ZZT back then! The player-made worlds were such a delight, and my slow-ass computer which choked on so many then-current games ran them without trouble.
Now I want to try it out again.
People are still making games using it! When I get a bit more free time I want to polish up and republish the ones I made.
I always wanted to play with the editor and make a game with it back then, but never got around to it. Perhaps it's still not too late!
ZZT is officially freeware these days, too! The last original floppy was purchased about five years ago, and afterwards Sweeney declared the program officially free to use, though sadly not open-source. I believe it has been successfully decompiled for over a decade, though.
I've been playing some Jazz Jackrabbit and Duke Nukem 1, they are both great. I think I prefer the design of DOS games to the design of console games.
Might be pushing the limits of shareware, but the demo of Quake 1 on cd for a buck. A simple console command unlocked the full version.
We had to be memory experts back then. QEMM FTW!
I can't tell you how many times I played the shareware version of Gazillionaire.
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.
Vintage gaming community.
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