It’s possible I may have gotten these as a donation, hrm. I can’t recall, I’ve purchased and received so many shareware collections over the years that they blend together… If you happened to have sent these to me, let me know!
@@phoenixzappa7366 I got these things as well from friends and like small stores, but then on CD a little later in the second half of the 90's. I still have a bunch of them ^^
I definitely remember seeing shareware collections like these in a few unboxing videos. Might not be too hard to figure out by looking at the collection piles at the end of each unboxing video
I remember Wiz Technology! Our family had a CD full of shareware bearing the Wiz logo, as well as their slogan, "Easy to use. Just type Wiz!". Stand out games included Commander Keen and Penny Penguin's Math Bingo. My brother was obsessed with it. Unfortunately, he took it to school one day and it came back broken, he was so upset. No more Penny Penguin.
Man this stuff makes so so nostalgic. While it said the $5 computer software store, they sold for $19.95 on my country! I made my own video covering my collection. I’m excited to see what you have and what I never bought back then.
Since it has appeared in the video, I need to mention that the creators of Boppin' were going to make another game that was basically No Man's sky but for DOS and it was set in a multiverse exploration instead of just space. They didn't do it and years later one of the creators made huge foundations for anime and manga on the internet for english readers, then they made several web comics that all had huge crazy rules for how the laws of physics worked in their worlds and it was revealed later that they were all connected with some crazy cool stuff about like people turned into a ai that then went back in time to create a splinter universe that is actually a prisim of light through the first universe and... so on and so forth. I didn't explain ANY of that well, but it's just always in my head whenever i see Boppin'
Commander Keen looks like the artist just drew over one of his kid's school photos. Reminds me of the art for the American distribution of "Atomic Punk" (arcade Bomberman).
Holy hell, this video has uncovered the 'missing' game that I could remember, but never found. Boppin'. I thought I just misremembered crystal caves. I can now rest in peace.
Duuude I remember Wiz! The second or third game I ever owned was a copy of Apogee's Pharaoh's Tomb on 5 1/4 floppy in about 1991. Funny thing is, I never saw any of this weird cover art, because all the Wiz-distributed titles I owned were just a floppy and sleeve, sold loose without any packaging, and usually purchased out a a big box of other questionable shareware floppies in a flea market-like setting. 🤔 But they all had that Wizard logo on the floppy label.
I remember getting Wolf 3D and Duke Nukem II in blister packaging similar to these. No fun weird artwork, but I still check eBay now and then hoping that one of them shows up. It can be so frustrating looking for particularly obscure (possibly even local) releases like that, especially when you're going off of 30 year old memories, but that's what makes the hunt exciting.
Seeing Cannon Fodder in a shareware collection is kinda surreal, I have the big box Amiga version of both 1 and 2. They probably didn't use the original artwork for that one as there was outrage over their use of a poppy with the slogan "War Has Never Been So Much Fun!"(also the lyrics of the theme song in the Amiga version), which is the symbol of Remembrance Day.
The original box has a camouflage soldier on the front, but he is very well hidden, so the box mostly looks green. It was pretty strange box art for it's day.
Didn't they claim it was glorifying war and disrespecting veterans? Of course, they never actually bothered playing the game before venting their outrage. If they had, they'd realise that it was one of the most anti-war games ever made; it showed just how much of a pointless waste of human life it is. Everyone should hear the intro song!
@@moloch5801 Yeah, moral outrage is typically really strange like that. Brass Eye summed up British newspaper crap pretty well. Of course, the papers were up in arms about that, too.
We used to get a shareware catalog in the mail. My mom would let me pick out like $20 worth of games. They didn't have any actual packaging, just a disk with a text only label shoved in a generic mailer. The catalogs were just black and white text with descriptions of each game. I remember getting a bunch of the Moraff's games.
So in Germany nobody had credit cards at the time.. so you would have to mail cash money to get the full version of the shareware you got from magazines or friends and stuff.. naturally nobody ever did that so we all were very familiar with the first few levels of Commander Keen 6 and Doom....
I can't believe that cannon fodder was a shareware release in the states! It was a great game that was big box in the stores in the UK and well worth the price.
Oh my god you have a treasuretrove of things that made me happy as a child. Wiz discs were how I played most every dos game back in the 90s. I used to get them in the bargain store in my tiny town every time my mom would take me there. Man such nice memories.
This made me look over my collection to see what I had, but you don't have (at least in your video) and I found the following. Doom, Hugo House of Horrors, Hugo II WhoDunit, Hugo III Jungle of Doom, Duke Nukem and One Must Fall 2097. Also my one says "Halloween Harry" on the cover instead of Alien Carnage! I hope you can acquire the missing pieces.
9:25 I got a magazine cover disc with "Vinyl Goddess from Mars" on it and quite enjoyed it, but was too embarrassed by the prospect of getting a "free" giant poster of a model in a PVC leotard and thigh boots ever to order the paid-for version!
these shareware discs brought back memories of the few random games I played as a small child, they weren't shareware but it sparked off that old memory and now I need to jump down some rabbit holes to find what I played.
My local Ralphs grocery store used to sell 5.25 and 3.5 shareware disks for a buck. This was of course LONG before CD-ROM. I had so much fun looking through those. I want to say Pharaoh's Tomb was the first one I got.
I googled Vinyl Goddess from Mars out of curiosity and interestingly enough under the reception tab of the Wikipedia article it cites a review Clint made back in 2009, I thought that was neat
That reminded me of a vending machine I saw back in the 1990's. You put in an amount I can't remember the prices & they would give you a shareware copy of the software on a floppy disk. I want to say it started with laser in the name of the machine. The one I saw was in Utah, but I can't remember which store I saw it in.
That is amazing. I cannot believe whatever company decided, "Let's put out a vending machine to sell these cheap games!" and then followed through with it.
I thought I had dredged my entire memory for all its DOS games but that God of Thunder art caught my eye and that’s one more forgotten game brought to light.
I remember playing Warheads for Windows from a massive compilation shareware disc from near the end of that era. I still remember the little tune that played when you started a new game or level.
I've owned a few of these over the years. I never thought about how weird the art is for this stuff but it's a good example of a field practically no artists create in. I've seen amazing game boxes, but I've seen so much "we want a cool box now, we don't care" sadness it's soured the whole thing which is mostly antiquated now...
Oh boy....While I don't quite remember WIZ Technologies, I do remember the store I worked at (Schottensteins in Columbus OH, Value City elsewhere) started getting bunches of shareware releases starting around 1995. They were almost always $1 each, and always on floppies. The one group we got had a variety of games like Sango Fighter, Wolfenstein 3D, Nitemare 3D, DOOM, Duke Nukum/Nukem and more. Some of the older stuff was even on 5 1/4" floppies! Another group of software was boxed copies of Epic shareware like Jill of the Jungle and several individual Epic Pinball tables like Super Android and Cyborgirl. And I remember when I first started hunting for titles for my very first CD drive, Micro Center had a goodly amount of shareware/junkware, usually for $4.99 or so. Ah, those were the days.....
I've got some floppies from Wiz Technology Inc. "Jazz Jackrabbit" and 2 floppies for the demo of "Teen Agent". A bunch of others from, I'm guessing, Australian companies that did similar packages: "RPM Shareware", "JLM Creative Software", "EFESS Software" and "ASIA, AusGames International Shareware Australia". Just a whole bunch of small companies that were interchangeable with each other for cheap shareware compilations.
It's baffling how much more power artists and illustrators used to have back then. It's not like there was a lack of them, look at the good cover stuff from that time. Cheap companies simply couldn't afford them or mess around with software instead. And if they did, then the difference in quality was a clear night and day comparison like in this video. Today I can still recognize corporate crap-art style, but on a much more subtle and subconscious level. Illustrators today are being straight-up compromised and boycotted on every aspect of their work by those who have never picked up a pencil.
My dad got me a few Wiz Technology disks when he'd go on business trips way back in the 90's, Commander Keen 1 and Hugo's House of Horror are the two I remember the most, they definitely came from an airport gift shop
Thank you for showing me raptor call of the shadows. I played it as a young teen but couldn't remember what it was called, just remember playing it. Worked nice on my 486 DX 2 66 MHz.
I had the Math Rescue, Word Rescue, Fuzzy's World of Miniature Space Golf & a few others , from Wiz Technology, on 3 1/2" inch floppy disks. The Fuzzy's World one came on 2 3 1/2" disks. From what I remember, the ones that I had came from a, now defunct, store called Place's, basically a poor man's Wal-Mart, in my hometown of Carrollton, MO.
Holy shit, I have some shareware from Wiz still hanging around that came from my cousins back in the day. Pretty sure my shareware copies of Duke 2, Monster Bash, and maybe one other came from Wiz.
I remember these distinct cover arts at the local discount stores here in Australia. I wonder if it was Wiz or a subsidiary but this is pretty much how I got a lot of my shareware back in the 90s. Begging my parents to get the latest disk that was on the shelf at the checkout. :D Thanks for bringing back these memories Clint!
Wow, they're mint! They sold them here in Australia too! I had Monster Bash & Traffic Department, and my brother had Raptor! So cool. We thought we were buying full version games and felt ripped off when we realised they were only the demo versions.
I remember seeing these on those rotating displays (like the kind you see sunglasses on). I distinctly remember a lot of Apogee games. I still have a bunch of Wiz stuff, mostly CGA games and old DOS programs.
YES! I was hoping this had Xargon in it. The Wiz version was the one I had and although I hadn't seen this in 20 years I could still remember it distinctly! The only shareware game I used my allowance to buy the full version of!
Nostalgia trip for sure! Would get one of these for a whole $2 back in the mid 90s. Going thru the specs on each one just to make sure it would run on my old 286. Major Stryker! Jetpack! Nitemare 3D! Traffic Department 2192! Monster Bash! Epic Pinball! Wolfenstein 3d! All in black and white and pc speaker.
Yooo mystic towers was amazing. We used to have all these shareware games back in the game and I don't think we ever upgraded to the real version of one of them. Can't imagine how many times I played this game and gawked at the demo at the end where it showed you what was to come in the full game
My local dollar store used to sell these. This was how I acquired Duke Nukem I & II. They sold them for the recommended $5 - which was a bit steep, considering there was another dollar store a bit further from me that would sell disks for $2 that would have two games on them. I also remember buying a really crappy top down racing game from the Wiz line up which came on a pink floppy disk, which I'd never seen before.
I remember the shareware compilation CDs that you could get through some magazines too. but yes I do remember buying some of these games through the Shareware racks found at various stores (Raptor, for example, I had as shareware). Of course most of these games (the full versions) can be downloaded as freeware or abandonware in some cases.
First game I ever bought for my 486 Dx266 (First PC) was this version of Wolf 3d at Australian type Dollar Store for $5. Still remember that cover 28 years later.
Loved seeing this. I got one of these no name shareware disks of Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold from a gas station in an outdoors mall in Kentucky years ago on a trip with my Grandma. It only cost $1. I wish I knew what happened to it.
I have purchased several of these games lately on GOG. Awesome to see these packages that I vaguely remember from working at Staples in the '90s. Peg panels full of these shareware games right at the registers that never sold @ only 99¢ a piece... then having to destroy them all for disposal.😪
Ohh these! I remember around the mid '90's here in NZ the ubiquitous retail chain The Warehouse briefly sold these. The '$5 software store' bit was covered up with a sticker and they were sold for $20 (NZD) each. Bought one and thought it was a full version, ahh yeah NAH! These later on (around '98 I think) turned up at Surplustronics, a surplus electronics shop up the top of Queen St in Auckland CBD and were being sold off for a $1, there were still some leftover when I worked there in 2000, bit of a blast from the past!
I remember back in the day there was this place that would send you a catalog of all their shareware and you would order discs through the mail. It was always a bit hit or miss since the descriptions were somewhat vague.
I love these shareware disks myself, having a soft spot for the free disks enclosed in the old PC and MAC magazines. I have a complete set of MAC Addict mags w/ disks I've been meaning to archive. I hope if you open these you spend a few moments archiving these for posterity.
I remember finding all the Hugo adventure games on disk through a company like this. Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom was found in some type of random auto shop.
Reminded me of a few shareware titles I had played to death back in the day but had forgotten about. A few are going cheap on Steam and GOG so I might pick 'em up.
That's actually a good deal for the Motorola Bravo pager.. There were super entry level ones which had a round button on the front face. The Bravo had a backlit display and more streamlined chicklet buttons on top. It was flagship.
Ahh, the days of Nitemare 3D (actually Hugo IV). It consisted of 3 episodes in the full retail: 1- Hugo's House & Gardens of Horrors 2- Hugo fights the Robots 3- Hugo goes to hell I always found it annoying that David P Gray decided on a hell episode for his game, because every FPS around the time of this release seemed to do the same thing.
Love going through the shareware titles, so many games from my childhood. God of Thunder was one of my favorites. The menu sounded like farts. It was great!
Daww, I was hoping you had the Blake Stone game in that stack. I bought it in an Albertson's in 1994 or so. It had the tentacle monster seen at 7:09 behind clipart of a man wearing a flight helmet+oxygen mask.
These were 20NZD a pop down here in New Zealand. My poor parents having to shell out for these because my brother and I would pester them non-stop to get at least one game whenever we would go to the bookstore. They probably got their money back as far as free tech support goes later on down the road, but still, wildly over priced in our funny little country.
I remember picking up the first chapter of Traffic Department 2192 for £3 in this sort of manner, though it was a big-box-style...box. Didn't mention anywhere that it was only the first part though!
wish he opened one of the copies that he had two of them like raptor to see the actual disc, i never had these kind of things since most i got from magazines or copies from friends or stores, but this is wonderful. and BIO MENACE needs an HD version like MONSTER BASH HD received, B-MENACE is one of my all time faves.
