Doom, one of the most influential videogames of all time, was famously distributed via the shareware model: The game’s first chapter was completely free, and if you liked it, you sent id Software some money and they mailed you the remaining two episodes.
What would sometimes happen in those pre-online days, though, is that less-than-scrupulous resellers would offer the shareware version for sale, even though it was meant to be free. For $5 (or whatever, it’s been a while), you could take home the hot new shooter from the guys who made Wolfenstein—and sure, you weren’t getting the whole thing, but whatever. It’s still Doom. Do you want to play it or not?
You might think that id Software would take issue with people making money on their work while they received nothing, but speaking at QuakeCon today, studio co-founder John Romero said the opposite was true: They were happy to see it happen.
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“Please do it. Don’t give us any money. Just get it out there,” Romero said about people who made and sold the shareware version of Doom on floppies. “You would go to the store and you would see 10 different boxes that all had the same shareware Doom in it. I don’t care. Give it to everybody, get it out there.
“We were totally happy with that. We were doing so much work just getting the game out. We knew in Taiwan that they were copying it: 100%, that was the market back then. So we contacted the biggest pirates there and went, ‘Can you buy boxes from us? Really cheap. Really really cheap.’ So they bought tons of boxes off of us, so it would be legitimate.
“Get it out there, make them feel good. We made money when people would actually order the rest of the game. We didn’t try to make money off the shareware [version].”
Romero said id viewed it as simply a form of distribution—because again, this was years before the ubiquity of the internet, and most gamers didn’t have easy access to this stuff, as we explored in our feature on how shareware transformed PC gaming forever.
Doom and other shareware games were available on BBSes, but that meant two things: You had to make a potentially lengthy (and expensive) long distance phone call if you didn’t happen to live close enough to a distribution board, and worse, you had to be one of those computer nerd weirdos who actually owned a modem. Believe me, there were not many of us back then. So, dodgy as they might have been, those not-entirely-legit disk-in-a-box distributions were good for id Software and gamers alike.
That attitude also informed the studio’s approach to copy protection, which is something it just didn’t bother with.
“There’s always been a war that’s never been won with copy protection, and we didn’t want to waste our time with that,” Romero said. “If people are going to copy it, they’re going to copy it. They might buy it some time later, but—we didn’t have money for everything we were playing, so we’re like, let’s not copy protect it. If people want to play it, they can still figure out how to play it.”