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.
@dosnostalgic I loved that old ASCII installer progress bar. It feels like the dumbest thing in the world to love, but it really impressed pre-teen me for some reason.
@fuchsiii @dosnostalgic There weren't enough of us playing to support anything cheap-to-us back then: iD were very much the equivalent of an established-but-smallish indie studio by today's standards, albeit with a lot of ability to hire interesting people! Certainly nowhere near the size of even one of Square's SNES-era teams.
Then again, from Doom onwards their stuff tended to want what counted as seriously high-end hardware at launch. The first two Unreal games went easier on the player's hardware budget than Quake 3 (which was contemporary with UT99 and the first iD game with no software renderer).
@fuchsiii @dosnostalgic this real?
Cuz if so I'm shure @grumpygamer sees it a lot...
@dosnostalgic It's the only version I had for many years.
@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.
@dosnostalgic Ah, sorry.