Back in the Cockpit

As a kid I never seemed to own the full version of anything. I didn’t play the second episode of Doom until I was in my twenties. To me Doom always meant the shareware cut, the Knee-Deep in the Dead techbase levels, sharing space on C: with the immortal Scorched Earth and the nearly forgotten Raptor: Call of the Shadows. I had a pirate copy of Warcraft II that was missing all its cutscenes, handed down by my uncle on at least 10 floppy discs. Even my legit install of X-COM might as well have been shareware for all the progress I made in it.

Beneath the names that tower in memory there’s a tangle of half-known titles creeping out of PC Gamer demo discs and Windows samplers. Some games, mechanics-first gems like Rocket Jockey, could be understood from a sample and mentally classified. But other demos felt like cuttings from something so vast I couldn’t imagine its shape. I remember being stunned by the early FPS/RPG Strife, which let you run and gun like Doomguy or stop and talk like a regular Joe RPG. I always wondered what lay beyond its shareware wall.