Retronauts - 539: Minesweeper + Shareware

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Book editors Jeremy Parish and Jared Petty talk to book authors Kyle Orland and Richard Moss about their books about the history of landmark computer games: "Minesweeper" by Boss Fight Books and "Shareware Heroes," respectively.

Retronauts is brought to you by Factor and Doublevine. This week in Retronauts, we're going to mine sweep you off your feet. everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. You know that by now. You've been listening to this show for a long time, and I've been making this show for a long time. But this week, I am by far the only games journalist in the room. In fact, it is a, well, actually, technically I am the only games journalist in the room because it's just me in the room. But the virtual room is jam-packed, full of seasoned, veteran, and extremely knowledgeable video games writers, people who write about video games, not people who write video games.

Although, Jared, I guess you have written some video games. So there's a little bit of that, too. So I'm going to let everyone introduce themselves, starting with the person whose name I've already mentioned, my cohort at Limited Run games. Hi, I'm Jared Petty. Yeah, I'm Jeremy's Minion at Limited Run. I would say cohort. You would say cohort. I just, I don't know. I feel like if I say Minion that I kind of get to, I can like kind of hunch over and be like, yes, Jeremy. And it's, it's really just something I aspire to in life. So I don't avoid. Minion has taken on a kind of grim meaning. Like you have to be wearing overalls and have like one eye. I say we just avoid that altogether. All right. Well, in that case, we will go with

cohort. It is a fine word indeed. And thank you very much for saying so. And also with us here, based in the Americas. We have I think someone making their retronauts debut. Am I correct on that? I was on an episode about Mario Land. That's right. Yes. That's right. So second time, but happy to be here again. I have a bad memory. I'm old. So yes.

Welcome back. I'm going to talk about your book that you've written and also the topic to which your book is attached, the topic which it is about. However, I'm phrased that. And, oh, go ahead. I'm Kyle Orland, by the way. I don't know if we said the name. Yes, that's always good to know. And then finally, dialing in from all the way on the other side of the planet, an early morning dial in.

Please introduce yourself returning to Retronauts to discuss another excellent book about video game history. This is Richard Moss, author of Secret History of MacGay. gaming, which I talked about a year, a bit ago, or was it earlier this year? I don't know. At some point in the past, I talked about that book. And now I've just had shareware heroes published, which is all about shareware games. And yeah, I wasn't sure what to expect when I opened up that book or, you know, read the PDF file. I was thinking it was going to be more kind of like an overview of the games themselves, but it really does a deep dive into the history of just the the commerce behind it. And there's a lot of major players currently in the video games industry

who are all intertwined throughout this story. So we're going to talk about shareware heroes in the second half of the episode. But I figured it would be easier to start with a sort of singular topic about one focused thing before branching out into the extraordinarily broad and expansive world of shareware. So we're going to start with Kyle Orland and talk about your book on Mind Sweeper. Tell us a little bit about first how you decided to write a book about a game that the entire world honestly takes for granted. Yeah, it's one of those games that not everyone has played, but if you were, I feel like, you know, there's a Oregon Trail generation if you grew up in that time. And there's also probably a Mind Sweeper generation if your first

experience with Windows PCs was in the 90s or early 2000s. then you probably stumbled on this game. You know, when I was thinking of games to pitch for Boss Fight books, I thought of games that, you know, meant a lot to me that I've played a lot throughout the years, and Minesweeper definitely qualifies. But also, I feel like Minesweeper is the game, if you take the ratio of hours played to aggregate words written about it, I don't think any game is going to beat Minesweeper's ratio.

You know, hundreds of millions of people easily have played this game. game. I calculated that there were probably 4 billion, with a B, copies of this game distributed with copies of Windows between 1992 and 2011. So something that's that ubiquitous and, you know, there are a handful of

articles. They're like, oh, remember MindSweeper? That was kind of fun. But it didn't really have that in-depth treatment that I felt it deserved. And once I started doing a little bit of research on it, I found this great deep world of competitive Mindsweeper and people trying to break the game to get better scores, of moral panic that developed around the game because it was included on government and work computers. Even the creation of the game in early Microsoft, which, you know, back in 1990 was not a video game company.

We take it for granted now that, you know, they're the Xbox people. But back then, even getting a game like Mind Sweeper published was an uphill battle. And, you know, just kind of developed from there and became fascinated by it. Yeah, for those business-oriented companies like IBM, Microsoft, and even Apple, just the idea of video games seemed to give them a collective cultural stomachache. They just hated the idea of their very large, expensive machines being seen as frivolous. And, you know, I know Steve Jobs in particular was, actually, it's kind of like the reverse of the Microsoft situation. Steve Jobs hated the idea of playing video games on Macintosh as he thought it would just make, you know, this cute little computer that had graphical abilities right out of the box and the cute little mouse that it controlled it, like would just make it frivolous and devalue the platform. Whereas it seems based on your text that it was kind of the opposite at Microsoft that Bill Gates was actually pretty into games, especially Minesweeper, and it was kind of the culture, you know, at the lower levels of the company, the management levels that was like, ah, video games.

Well, I don't know if he got into other video games, but Minesweeper was one that definitely hooked Bill Gates, which was pretty much the biggest booster you could have at Microsoft of the time. You know, there's a great anecdote in there of, you know, him sneaking into other people's offices after he took Minesweeper off of his own computer because he just was jonesing for it during late nights and, you know, calling people in to confirm his high scores. But probably my favorite anecdote from the whole book is his future wife, Melinda Gates, would send a memo to the team behind Minesweeper. and it basically said, please don't share any updates on the new Minesweeper high scores with Bill Gates because he has very important things to do and he cannot be distracted by this game. Wow. Looking out for the company, even at that early time.

Yeah, it's, you know, Microsoft at the time they had flight simulator, I guess, and maybe like Microsoft Links. And, you know, they weren't exactly against other people making games for, MS DOS or whatever. But yeah, for Microsoft itself to make games that would sit on the shelves next to, you know, Microsoft Office or Microsoft Word, there were people in the company that are kind of quoted in the book who say, you know, this is going to ruin our reputation. This is going to make these businesses that have, you know, six-figure, seven-figure contracts with us, think twice about seeing us as a serious company. But then there was one division.

inside of Microsoft, the entry business unit that was tasked with trying to get these, you know, $2,000 plus dollar computers into homes instead of just businesses and labs and governments and stuff. And they saw an opportunity here. They thought games could be the wedge

to convince families to buy these things. Because if there's a game that the kid wants, the kid is never going to shut up about, you know, I want this computer. This is something, you know, it's not just eat your vegetables, you know, use the online, use the CD-ROM psychopedia or whatever, do your homework, it's, oh, there are fun games on here too. Well,

you know, maybe, maybe I'll actually buy it. My kid actually wants to use the computer rather than just needing it for schoolwork or something. Yeah, when Boss Fight books announced that they were publishing your book on Mindsweeper, I know I'm going to say Minecraft at some point in this time. If I haven't, if I haven't already. But if you're listening at home, just mentally edit it to say Mind Sweeper. That is what I meant. Is Microsoft guys a monopoly on these mind games now?

Yeah, they really do. They're cornering the market. Yeah. So, yeah, when I heard that they were publishing it, I was really happy because way back in the days of OneUp.com, there were a few times where I said, you know, we should really do like an in-depth history of Minecraft, like a real deep analysis. Yes, there we go. Mindsweeper. No, no. I knew it was going to happen. So that's why I put up the warning. Yeah, we need to do like a really deep dive into Mind Sweeper. But we also didn't really really. have the expertise or, you know, really know where to start looking for it. So it's been one of those projects that's been on the back burner for me. Like, it'd be great if I could do this someday, but I never will. So the fact that you stepped up and just absolutely nailed it with your book, makes me really happy. Like, I'm really glad that this book exists. And it's just called

Minesweeper, right? Yes, it's Minesweeper by Bossby Books, if you want to avoid the confusion. And thank you for putting off that project at one-up, or else, you know, I might have had nothing to do. I'd have had to find another game. It would have been like, it would have been like 2,000 words. So there would have been a lot, a lot that could have been added to that. But yeah, like it would have been a purge from the web by now anyway. That's true. It wouldn't exist anywhere.

It could have been a starting point, but it's unfortunate because one of the creators of MindSweeper actually passed away a few years before I started the reporting on this. And, you know, he didn't really have, he was interviewed once by Eurogamer, I think, and at that point didn't really have much to say about it. It wasn't, you know, I feel like if I created a game like Mind Sweeper that was, you know, a household name that had been played by hundreds of millions of people, it would be the first thing I bring up, you know, at every dinner party or, you know, I try to work the conversation over, oh, yeah, Mind Sweeper, have you heard of that? That's me, you know. But these people, the two people who were most responsible for MindSweeper, were kind of humble about it. They, you know, weren't really game developers. They used these kind of as learning tools, adapting older games to kind of try to learn how to program on Windows or OS2, if anyone remembers that old operating system. Yes. And, yeah, they basically think their work on, like, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Word was much more impacted.

And if MindSweeper comes up, the reaction is kind of, oh, sorry for wasting all your time. Sorry for making this distraction from serious things, which I kind of find surprising, actually. You talked about them Richard Adapting from older ideas. I've often wondered about this with Minesweeper, and you've done the dig in. I'd really love to know. Was it influenced by early things like life, you know, one of the earlier video games from the mainframe era, where you kind of set a grid loose and watch what happens as things become alive or dead next to one another. Was it influenced by that at all or something like flag capture for the VCS?

Or where did the genesis of this grid-based puzzle interaction game come from? Yeah, I didn't find any links to those games specifically. But, you know, there are, you know, early magazines like Creative Computing had, you know, find the hidden object to games. Sometimes text-based, we type in or coordinate. And it would say, oh, it's, you know, to the north, to the south. And, you know, you had games like Hunt the Wumpus, which were about finding things in a way. But then there was this ZX Spectrum game called Mind Out, which was the first one to really have the grid and kind of the idea of adjacency where you're walking and it says, oh, there are three minds nearby. It only used the cardinal directions, the left, right, up and down.

So without the diagonals, it kind of made it a little harder. I guess. Also, it only told you about the square you were currently on, so you'd have to backtrack and remember what the number was. And, you know, you had to work your way through. That was probably the genesis of the idea. You can then trace it through, you know, in the 80s, if you saw a good game idea, you basically just adapted it for your own platform and wrote it from scratch because these were relatively simple games. And, you know, they would add certain things. you know, the idea of diagonal adjacency or mouse controls or the idea of marking flags, if you knew they were there. So a lot of that groundwork had already been laid by the time these two Microsoft coders got to using Minesweeper as kind of a tutorial. The main thing that Minesweeper itself added in the end was the idea of clearing the entire board. Most of the games for that, you were kind of going from one side of the board to the other

or from the upper left corner to the bottom right. So if you got a really lucky path, you might not even encounter any difficult minds. The sweep mode in MindSweeper forced you to find every open square, which meant that if there was a tricky corner, you couldn't just ignore it by walking the other way, I guess. For you, Richard, when it comes to the games from Microsoft for Windows,

the entertainment pack games, you know, not just solitaire in this, but things like Fujigal or ski free or the rest. Like, obviously, Mindsweeper is one of the most widely distributed. Where do you think it falls in terms of its genius or its quality? I mean, is Mindsweeper, did Mindsweeper deserve its success, in your opinion? Yeah, you know, some people, if you talk about Mindsweeper, they'll say, oh, of course it was successful. You know, it was included on billions of computers. you know, it had a leg up over, you know, any other game at the time.

Well, of course, it's going to be a big thing. But if you look back on the early versions of Windows, Microsoft included a copy of Reversey, which is also known as Othello, you know, that tile flipping game. I don't know if you guys have played. Oh, do I know it? I made so many videos about Othello games that was all over Japanese consoles. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that early consoles had a lot of those.

There was a console dedicated entirely to Othello called De Othello Multivision. It had it built in. And that was the hook, buy this console, play Othello, and also some other stuff like Cuberd, who cares? I had no idea. So, yeah, that was included, people forget, on Windows 1.0 through 3.0. And people just didn't care. You know, it's the kind of game you play once.

And you're like, oh, okay, you know, it's Othello. You know, the computer's really hard. I think there was a two-player mode at one point, but if you're just playing against the computer, it's just not that satisfying. But then Windows 3.0 introduced Solitaire, and that was, and still is, a mega hit, even bigger than MindSweeper, I'd say.

Everyone who has played on a Windows PC has those solitaire. And, you know, there's a quote in the book that that's the thing that people would talk about after Windows 3.0. They didn't care about, you know, multitasking. They didn't care about, you know, being able to resize windows or copy and paste or whatever, they talked about Solitaire. And Microsoft was kind of stunned. They were like, wow, this is what's making an impact.

This is, you know, a thing that shows something we can do over DOS. You know, it's a graphical game. It uses the mouse. It teaches people how to use the mouse in a way. And then there was that little victory animation at the end of Solitaire. You remember with the cascading cards bouncing all over the place. You know, there are stories about when that first happened. People would, like, call over others from their cup was like, come on, I got the cutscene.

I got the bouncing cards. Come look. They would gather around the computer. That was like, you know, the ending of Final Fantasy 7 or something for that time period. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be.

I'm not. The Reviews are in it's The Revues are in, and it's Unanimous. by all. What documentary you might be heard to ask? Why, Double Find Psych Odyssey? Surgically assembled from over 5,000 hours worth

of footage, Double Find Psych Odyssey at long last, answers the question, just how do they make those dang video games? It might not surprise you, but video games are incredibly complicated. And through this 32-part documentary, you'll learn all the dirt about how Psychonauts 2 came together, and I assure you

you're not going to be watching a bunch of nerds clickety-clacking away on keyboards. Double-fine Psych Odyssey has all the drama, conflict and huge personalities of your favorite reality shows, but it's actually about something important video games. Just hear what the critics are saying. Danny O'Dwyer of Noclip called it a dream come true. Minmack said it's the greatest video game documentary of all time.

And God of Wars, Corey Barlog explained, Absolutely Love This Doc even exists. Gonna Binge it. You can watch the entire series for free with no ads right now in 4K with real captions made by a human on YouTube. Just go to doublefine.com slash retro to start your psychodicy. That's doublefine.com slash retro. So we're nearly halfway through our discussion of Minesweeper. So at this point, it might be whivist to actually explain what Minesweeper is for the two or three people listening to this podcast who, you know, maybe they only have ever used Macs or Linux or something.

So they've never encountered Minesweeper. it is one of those games that is just incredibly ubiquitous. I think, you know, if you grew up in the 90s, the 2010 or 2000s, you just, you encountered it. It was on computers. It was there. And at some point, inevitably, you started clicking around to say, is there something I can do on here besides work? And you'd find Minesweeper. And, you know, my wife doesn't play a lot of video games. She got hooked on Animal Crossing and that's about it. But when I mentioned I was doing, a Mind Sweeper podcast, she said, oh, that sounds really familiar. And I see, I, you know, explained the grid. And she was like, oh, yeah, I can't play that. It gets me really stressed out. So people have visceral reactions to it, too. But yeah, let's, let's talk a little bit about what the hell it even is. It's, um, it's funny you say visceral reactions because, you know, people click around mind sweeper sometimes. And, you know, a lot of people think it's a guessing game. Well, they'll click around and they'll get a few numbers and then they'll get a mine. And they're like, oh, I, I lose, you know, how was I supposed to know a mine was there? You know, they never figure out that the numbers actually mean, oh, this many are adjacent to the square in, you know, what do they think the numbers mean? I don't know. Some people, well, some people they see numbers and they're just like, oh, it's a math game.

You know, I hate math. I'm scared of math. I'm not doing this. Where Solitaire is a little more inviting, I think. But really, it's more of a logic game than a math game. You know, you have to count up to three or maybe. before. And that's about it. It's not adding things necessarily. So yeah, and, you know, there's a help file that explains all this stuff, but a lot of people don't do that. You really have

to have someone explain it to you. Then you click through and you're like, okay, so this square has one, it just has a one, which means one of these two squares is a mine. And if one of these two squares is a mine, it means that other one is already satisfied because it's going to be one of those two. So that means those other ones that are next to the one are going to be safe. So you click on those and you have a click-click, and you say, oh, okay, now that's a three, and there's three more open spots, so you can right-click and mark those as mines, and then, you know, you kind of go from there. The kind of unsatisfying thing about mine sweepers, anyone who's played knows, is that eventually in a lot of games, you get to a point where you have to guess, where it's down to two squares,

and either one of them could be a mine, and there's no more information you can get. I think someone did a study, and on an expert board of Mind Sweeper, it was some ridiculously low percentage of games that can actually be solved without any guessing, 10% or on that order. So I think that randomization gives it kind of that one more game appeal where, you know, you feel like the next one is going to be that one where you guess correctly or you get the arrangement that's everything's going to fall into place. So it's weird because it's a logical game, but it's also a lot of luck in there. Yeah, I mean, it kind of tickles the Vegas node of the brain, I think, because there's a lot of, you know, card games that are very logic-based, but still ultimately, you know, gambling Vegas is about luck. So, yeah, I can see where that would that would kind of, you know, make the neurons fire in the same approximate way. I made a comparison at one point in the book to roguelikes as well, because you get a random, board and one false move and you have to start over.

Now, you know, you're starting over after just a few minutes instead of, you know, in a rogue like you may have put in hours into a game. And there's no items or anything. But, you know, still, I see the link there. And I think it's the randomization that really gives it longevity over something like Reversey, where it's, you know, pretty much the same every time if you play the same way. Yeah, I'd be curious to hear how everyone. kind of first encountered Mind Sweeper, or at least, you know, what your memories of the game

are. Richard, we, you haven't really had a chance to talk yet. I'd be curious to hear, you know, what, what your experience was with Mind Sweeper? And what do you even think of it? Do you even like it? I do like it. I have sunk not many, many hours into it, but on and off, I've jumped in and gotten pretty hooked and played 10, 20 games back to back, desperately trying to to get some sort of streak going and being frustrated when I'm like, I must be missing something here and I get to that end point. And I'm at the, I don't have the information here. I'm going to have to guess. I hate that part. But I first encountered it in the mid-90s, I think, on my brother's laptop. He had Windows 3.1 on a laptop and I played it on there. And I didn't

really get it. I was pretty young still. And then I remember my other distinct memory of MindSweeper, I did it now, back in high, it was back in high school. There was this one kid who, he seemed to have figured out some sort of exploit. He would click around like crazy, really, really fast using the right click, and somehow he would solve the game in a few seconds without doing any logic. I never asked him how he did it. But So by clicking really, really fast, he'd figure out some key locations. So there must have been in some versions of the game, an exploit that if you clicked really quickly, you could reveal the locations of the mines.

We need to get him on awesome games done quick. Yeah, I never stumbled upon that one. There were some people who used early Windows macros to just keep clicking over and over in the top left corner. and if the minds are arranged in a certain way in a beginner game, it'll just solve the whole board in one click, and you get an unbeatable one second time. And that was actually used to kind of put Bill Gates in his place

and kind of show, hey, this is the new record. You're never going to be able to beat it. And Bill Gates sent a charming all-staff email about this. Like, oh, I guess the computers have beaten us. You know, human ingenuity is over type thing. And now he's investing in AI. Actually, I don't know. Well, I don't know.

Yeah. I would have liked to get him for the book, but that was not to be his... Yeah. That's a big guy. He might be a little above our weight class. It's not the kind of thing that takes up his time these days. Jared, what about you? For me, it was a Windows game, probably through Entertainment Pack 1 for Windows 3.0,

which I think was the first place it was ever released. East because I'm pretty sure that that was the one that came with Microsoft Tetris, and I think that's the one I first had. So, yeah, and that came, that was just before the Windows 3.1 upgrade, and then if not, I got it through the way 3.1 upgrade. But I had a Windows PC, and I preferred Minesweeper to Solitaire by a mile and played hundreds of hours, I would say, of Minesweeper over the course of my junior high and senior high school years. I came, it was on everything. She could just keep playing it. I liked the fact that it was an uncrual puzzle game. And you talked earlier about the randomness.

I like the randomness. I liked the fact that sooner or later I had to give in to fate. But I was delaying that as long as possible. And also, I was never completely sure if I was giving in to fate or just being stupid. And I like that too. I don't enjoy many puzzle games. I'm not good at puzzles. So that part of my brain is just kind of a dried husk.

But it was so darn approachable. The fact that the playing field could be resized any way you wanted it to be, that you could tweak it. I didn't care about time. I was just going to play it as I wanted. And it was really rewarding to click in just the right place and watch half the playfield clear. And it had just said this wonderful vibe. And dying felt good. You little minds there and just start right over.

So, yeah, this is a game that I have a lot of love for in my heart. My favorite personal story, though, for Minesweeper is when I was living in Japan, around 2009, discovering a CD-ROM port of Minesweeper for the PC engine, the Derbographic 16, a console port of Minesweeper. On CD. Yes, on CD. Really taking advantage of the medium. Yeah, of all that power. And it's pretty much just Minesweeper. I mean, there's like a couple other modes on there, but it's just Minesweeper.

And, of course, our good friends at Packin Video gave it to us. So, you know, got to love that. But, Kyle, have you ever played this one? No, I don't think I came across it. It's just have, like, a CD soundtrack to take up all that space. Not really. I mean, it's, it's quite underwhelming. It's a fine version of Mindsweeper.

It's got some music, yeah. But, like, it's not, you know, I'm not sitting here, listen to the jams of Mindsweeper, you know. Yeah, its existence isn't totally inexplicable because, you know, this would have been the early 90s, and this was before Windows really took hold in Japan. So Japanese gamers still mostly, if they wanted to play on PC, we're using the kind of the Japan-built systems, like, you know, if they were very lucky, X68,000, but usually like a PC 8801, PC-901, and they just didn't have access to cool Microsoft stuff, what, you know, cool Microsoft stuff there was. So there was a thriving business, a kind of booming business, a kind of booming.

business for companies like Packin Video and Infinity to convert, you know, Imagineering, to convert American PC games to Japanese consoles or Japanese computers because they just didn't have the native support with Windows yet and DOS. Like MS DOS just never was a thing over there. So, yeah, it's a cool little artifact of this one odd little quirk of Japanese computing history. Yeah, it floored me when I found it on CD. I was just like, this is the funniest video game. It's got a cool shark on the cover, too.

Yeah, MindSweep is the kind of game that gets ported to everything. People use it as like a weekend project to, you know, learn a new platform. It's on everything from mainframes to, you know, if you type in MindSweeper into Google, you get a version that you play in a web browser now. There was also a Best of Windows Entertainment Pack officially released that included MindSweeper on Game Boy Color. Yep, I own that. I own that. So I don't know if there was a Japanese release for that,

but it's the kind of thing that could have made it to places that didn't get Windows. Yeah, for me, yeah, for me, when I think of Minecraft and, or MindSuite, and memories. I always think about my senior year of high school. My family finally got a computer. Windows, I think it was probably 3.1 at that point. And it had mine sweeper on it. And I had just acquired my own CD player. Like this was, you know, the very end of my high school career. And I was finally able to afford a CD player. So I was, you know, had a very small selection of CDs. And I was listening to music by new groups that I'd never heard before. So for me, it's just this memory of, sitting in my my parents' room on their computer, playing Minesweeper and listening to King Crimson over and over again. Those are like, it's a very strange pairing that probably only makes sense to me, but that's, that's where it is. So I can't see that without hearing, you know, the crashing 21st century schizoid man

blasting into my ears. But what about you, Kyle? Clearly, you know, this game must have made an impact on you if you decided. to write an entire book about it, a game that, you know, consists of a gray grid with some numbers on it. Yeah, I remember pretty clearly. I must have been 11 or 12. I was in, my mom had taken me to work on some summer day where she couldn't find other

childcare. And, you know, this was before the internet was really available on computers. So she went to a meeting and said, you know, goof around on the computer. It's okay. And, you know, I probably spent 15 minutes on solitaire. Maybe I played around in the word processor or something. And then I found, you know, mine sweeper. And, you know, I clicked the round.

And like everyone else, I didn't know what was going on. I was trying to figure out what these numbers meant and just dying over and over again. And when my mom came back from her meeting, I asked her, you know, what is this game? And, you know, she was busy, but she dropped everything and pointed out, you know, the logical rules and said, you know, the basics, this one means this and that. And I remember, you know, just being focused for the next few hours. hours, like, staring at these things, like, okay, this is a one, a two, and a one. So that means this, I was, like, going in slow motion compared to how I can play it now, but I was picking out, you know, I was, I was learning logic in my head.

And I don't know, I guess that really always stuck with me. One, that this was a game that my, even my mom could play, because, you know, there was, I don't think there was any other video game she ever taught me anything about or that she played seriously even. And also just, you know, that kind of figuring out the logic for yourself at that age, I guess, was a really impactful thing for me, made me feel like, you know, the smartest, most precious little boy in the whole country. And, yeah, the rest is history. I'd come back to it, you know, constantly over the years. I'd have, like, foul periods and then intense periods where I'd play it for months and be fighting with my roommate for the high score again.

And then I'd get tired of it and go off again. And then every time I came back, I felt like, oh, I've gotten a little better. I've, you know, my, I don't know, my logical skills or my hand-eye coordination has gotten better. So it was kind of like growing up with the game. And, you know, because of the randomization, it was always fresh. It never really felt stale the whole time. And then it went away. So it never really went away.

It went away from being built into Windows, which is kind of impacted. But, you know, it's never totally gone. away. In fact, China, apparently, which is a few operating systems behind in a large part of the country, if they're still on Windows XP or Windows ME, they have a thriving

minesweeper scene because all their computers have it built in. And apparently the highest level competitors in MindSweeper are now coming from China just because of that. Awesome. That's so cool. And it's now the kind of thing that parents are kind of introducing

to their kids, I feel, which is, you know, kind of a scary thought to me. But it's, you know, it's a 30-year-old game. So now it's kind of spanned generations, I guess. You know, I don't think kids are really stumbling upon it on their own so much. But, you know, I see a lot of people on Twitter, you know, when I search out Minesweeper talking about the Google version of the game, which is like the main one they know when they type in Minesweeper. And then, oh, it's a cool little game you can play on Google. Google, they don't associate it with Windows. They associate it with their search engine. So why did Microsoft let Minesweeper effectively go away? They, you know, they created the game,

they owned the game. It was just a, you know, kind of background revenue generator for them for years. It's not like Microsoft hasn't updated other forms of software. I mean, Microsoft flight simulator is on, what, 6.0 or something? Right. So why, why did they just let Minesweeper go away without, you know, including like Minesweeper deluxe or, you know, HD Minesweeper or something on modern builds. So be careful what you wish for, I guess, in this case. Mindsweeper was kind of a vestigial part of Windows for two decades. You know, every new version, they're like, oh, yeah, we'll put in Minesweeper, obviously,

and they, you know, they update the theming, the colors and such, and that's about it. And then for Windows 8, they came along and they were like, we need a thing that's going to sell the Windows store. We want people to come to the Windows store and know this is the place to download your Windows apps now. You don't buy them from somewhere else. Buy them on the Windows store. What do we have that can attract people to the Windows store? Oh, we have Solitaire and MindSweeper.

Oh, but those are already built in to Windows. Oh, okay, well, take them out from being built in and put them on the Windows store. And then people will know that they have to go to the Windows store. And, you know, people did do that, and they went to the Windows Store to download Solitaire and MindSweeper. But they were also really mad that they had to go through a few extra steps to get MindSweeper and Solitaire. Even if, and that's if they realized it. Some people just saw, oh, they're not there anymore. I guess they don't exist anymore.

The other thing they did, when they moved these to Windows Store versions, they were still free. But, of course, this being the 2010s, now these free versions had ads. They had a subscription plan to get rid of the ads. They had daily challenges that gave you these, you know, jankly little coin animations to try and get you addicted and to play every day. You know, Mind Sweeper's addictive enough as it is, but they were, you know, doing these dark patterns to try and sell more ad views. And, you know, it kind of rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in that.

The one thing they did do is they added an adventure mode, which kind of harkens back to some of the earlier precursors of Mindsweeper, actually. This is one where you're going from left to right. it's still basically Minesweeper with the numbers and everything but it's got this Indiana Jones style cave theming now and you can get pickaxes to break through walls you can get explosives

you can open treasure chests and it's so and you do a progression through levels now you collect extra hearts it's actually a pretty fun way to play I think that got spun off into its own separate game so yeah they did kind of do that

HD remake treatment I guess But in doing so, they also took all the other lessons from casual games from the last 20 years for adware and subscriptions. It's give and take. Yeah, that description of the one with the coins and stuff just reminds me why I stopped playing Bookworm once they replaced it with Bookhorn, too. I played that game all the time. And then all of a sudden, like, every game was just cluttered with animations and like, hey, do a daily challenge. And no, I just want to, like, make some words. Please, for the love of God, just stop.

I'll give you, like, I gave you money. Stop throwing all this stuff at me. Can't leave well enough alone. Oh, it's terrible. And, you know, of course, there's third party versions that try and capture the classic feel. And you can go to, you know, Minesweeper. Dot online, I think, is a great version that lets you play that looks and feels exactly like Windows 3.1 and with stat tracking and everything else you might want.

But the official Microsoft version now is kind of this Frankenstein's monster of, you know, hey, remember MindSweeper? This is, we've dialed it up now. A game that really needed to be dialed up. Yeah, I feel like the PC engine port had it right. Just keep it simple. Like, yeah, I don't know. With a CD soundtrack.

Yeah, I'm not a video game developer. So what do I have to say? What do I know? I mean, I'm sure it's very, I get the impression this is much more lucrative to them. than giving it away free for 4 billion copies that, you know, I don't think it really sold a copy of Windows since 1992. It's not the kind of thing where, like, I'm choosing between Windows and a Mac. Oh, I'm going to choose Windows because then I get a free copy of Mind Sweeper. No one has ever said that in the history.

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I mentioned my senior year of high school. When I graduated from high school, my graduation gift was to help me buy a computer, which I bought a Mac, and I've been using a Mac ever since. So to me, Minecraft is still, or MindSweeper is still this fun novelty. It's this thing that I occasionally get to do like the forbidden fruit of the other side.

So it makes me sad to hear that it's gone away because, you know, I would boot into Windows occasionally on my previous Mac laptop, but now that they've gone to the Apple Silicon, I can't do that anymore for the time being at least. So I'm, you know, bereft of contact with Windows. So I guess I just have to fire up the old bootlegs

Or, you know, maybe track down that PC engine version next time I'm in Japan. That's how I feel about the jigsaw puzzle that was included in early versions of Mac OS. It's the kind of thing where I'd ever had a Mac growing up. So when I got on one, I was like, oh, I want to try that jigsaw puzzle game. You mentioned the Google version earlier. And I do think that's probably the most accessible and enjoyable one that I've found since. It's really not a bad little port of minesweeper at all. And they don't.

It's very Googled. It's very primary colors, but it's mind sweeper, no frills, and I think it's a lot of fun. Yeah, and I think that comes the closest to instant access in the way that, you know, in the early days of Windows, you know, there were PC games and there were PC gamers at the time, but mostly that meant, you know, driving to the store and squinting at boxes and seeing what worked with your graphics and sound drivers or whatever and then installing some massive thing from a bunch of discs and reading a manual about, you know, some role-playing game or simulation. And compared to that, Minesweeper being like two clicks away on literally every Windows installation was just a revelation for people. It was the start of instant access casual gaming that we take for granted now in today's free-to-play world. Yeah, it really started something that I don't even think anyone recognized at the time. So final question to the imaginary room before we move on to our second segment. We've talked about where Minecraft's Minesweeper started and where it went.

And so now my question is, where would you like to see? it go. For me, I'm going to go first here. I'd like to see Microsoft combine it with Minecraft and just give us Minecraft or Minesweeper built in Minecraft and just make it so much easier for me when I talk about this game. So it doesn't matter if I mess it up because I'm still correct. That's my future. That's my dream. My sweeper craft. Yes. Let's go in reverse order from the last round. So that would be Kyle. What do you want to see? Really, I'd like to see a version that also had the classic mode, you know, how some modern retro remakes they let you

go back and forth between retro pixel graphics and the updated version. I want something where you can click a mode and it gives you the old Windows 3.1 style box with a smiley face on the top and everything. And also, I'd just like them to build it into Windows again. I understand that start menu space is at a premium, and, you know, if it's a choice between that and, you know, Microsoft Mail, uh, Minesweeper is not going to win. But I don't know, I think for a whole generation of people, it's just so associated with pre-instillation on Windows that you think of Windows, you think of Mind Sweeper and vice versa. And I, I think that's worth, you know, one slot in, in the start menu that's not going to hurt anyone. I don't know. Jared, what about you?

How about this? Since it's Microsoft, let's build it back into Windows, just like we said here. But let's go ahead and build it into every Xbox as well with like an NBA Jam button code maybe. And Mindsweaver just pops

up on your screen. I like that. I'd love to be able to sit and play a quick game of MindSweeper on my Xbox. That's the same, you know, again, that 3.1 formatted version whenever I wanted. And it keeps track of the stats.

Why not? Throwing a, you know, throw in a perk or two, air that I can show off to my friends and put it on your PCs. Just have it everywhere. Windows wants to do everything everywhere now, so let's just do that. You know, in the Xbox 360 days, there was an Xbox Live Arcade-style Minesweeper that added, you know, a few different modes and things.

Didn't really catch on, probably because, you know, it cost money instead of being a free building. I feel like it was just dying for a Geometry War style. Oh, there you go. And finally, Richard, bring it on home for us. What do you want to see in MindSweeper's future? Yeah, I was just thinking about that. And I had a few ideas come to mind,

one that I genuinely just want them to do, and two, that I'm super curious, someone to try it. So I genuinely would love to see them just bring back the old Mindsweeper, Windows 3.1 or Windows 3.0, 3.0 version. No, super old school. Just make it playable, right in built into windows again. But out of curiosity, maybe morbid fascination, I'd love to see them try doing a HoloLens version, somehow, try and figure out how to do it as an augmented reality game that you can project onto your wall, just to see if it can be done. Or how about project it onto the floor and then you have to step on the actual minds? Yeah, that would be so cool.

It would be terrible once you've played it once, but it would be so cool to do it one time. An explosive new version of Twister. And then I was thinking, like, do you guys remember Space Invaders Extreme on the, on the D-S? Some sort of remix like that would be fascinating to see them try and do some sort of really cool arcade remix. Somebody called Jeff Mentor. Yeah. Just like fireworks and psychedelic colors everywhere, every time you click. I like it.

Yeah, or even, I could see some sort of mashup. Kyle, you mentioned the sort of spiritual similarity with roguelike games, a minesweeper roguelike, like incorporate those two concepts together somehow. That would be very interesting. Maybe that's more of an indie game than a Microsoft game. Well, it's funny. That treasure hunt mode I was describing the Indiana Jones thing. It kind of is that. It's still Microsoftified, so it's not really.

It's not a lot of bells and whistles. But I think people could run with that and really make something, you know, based on MindSweeper, but, yeah, it gives you progression and items and all that other stuff that goes with it. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Kyle. Please remind us where we can find your book. Everyone should buy it and read it because it's very interesting. It's available via bossfightbooks.com is probably the best way to buy it.

There's also some excerpts online, which are not too hard to find. And I suppose if you really want to, you can buy the Amazon version and give me a little less money. Fucking Amazon. It's nearly summer, and that means even we indoor-dwelling retro-gaming types will probably be venturing outside and doing stuff. I mean, between the switch, analog pocket, and steam deck, we've never had more excuses to go outside, which is to say more portable gaming options. But alas, leaving our dim caves means having to think about wholesome, convenient meals for sunny active days.

Good thing there's Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal kit, ready to deliver flavorful, nutritious, ready-to-eat meals right to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track reaching your goals, whether those gains involve your muscles or just experience points. Factors cheaper than takeout, way healthier than fast. fast food, and each meal takes only a couple of minutes to prepare, just heat and serve in less than two minutes. They're great for calorie-conscious eaters, too, with dietitian calorie-smart meals that

mostly contain less than 550 calories per serving. There are plenty of other meal options, too, including keto-friendly options, vegan and vegetarian choices, and protein plus. Factor offers nearly three dozen different options each week, and you can hack your selections by adding, say, a protein to a vegetarian selection. And Factor is a sustainable choice. They offset 100% of their delivery emissions to your door. Source 100% renewable electricity for their production sites and offices,

ship and recyclable or reusable packaging, and feature sustainably sourced seafood in their meals. So head to FactorMeals.com slash Retronauts 50 and use code Retronauts 50 to get 50% off your first box. That's code Retronauts 5.0.5.0. at FactorMeals.com slash Retronauts 5.0 to get 50% off your first box. All right, so moving on to a subject that, I don't know, kind of feels sort of spiritually connected to Mindsweeper.

And maybe it's just because somewhere back in the early primal days of this topic, you have Microsoft being involved and playing a kind of early role in making it even begin to happen, at least on a fundamental level, we have the topic of shareware. And I think we should start this segment by actually addressing what the hell is a shareware? What even is that? I don't know if that concept really exists as, you know, in the traditional classical sense. I don't know if people still use that word anymore. So Richard, please walk us through what on earth this is and what made you decide that you should

write a book about it. Okay. So shareware sort of fundamentally comes down to a pretty simple idea, which is that you get a program free and if you like it, you pay for it. Now, it had lots and lots of different models and that's something that I explore in the book because it's very rare that someone's just going to receive and thing. And out of the goodness of their heart, go, okay, I want to give this person money because I like it. You almost always need some sort of incentive to convince them to make the effort, particularly back in the 80s and the 90s, where the effort is quite substantial. You had to write a check and mail it to the person who made the game or the app.

So that's a lot of work that you've got to do. It's not just an impulse buy. And as for why I wrote this book, it started actually out of my previous book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, and I had a chapter in there about shareware Mac games. And when I was thinking about the next project, I thought, you know, there's this shareware thing. No one's really ever gone deeply into shareware, but it seems like it's been pretty impactful on the world. a lot of what we have now in free-to-play games and just this horrible world of micro-transactions is an evolution on shareware with the worst parts of coin-op thrown in. And I wondered, how can I trace this history back and see the evolution

and maybe learn something about the way things are today while getting to tell a lot of stories that haven't been told before. So let me ask everyone, kind of similar to Minecraft, like what was your first encounter with shareware that you remember? And did you actually send in money for it? Jared, let's start with you. Okay, so, yeah, again, IBMPC World, shareware, I don't remember a time without it.

Now, in my childhood brain, you got to remember these things were a little convoluted because there was shareware. and then there was the software that I was just stealing and in my head there wasn't a lot of difference between the two of them for a while you could go to you know they used have computer fairs and computer shows and you would walk in and you would still buy the games but you'd buy them on cracked discs five to a you know five games to a disc or something from some dude in overall smoking a cigar and and you'd give him ten dollars

and it give you like 20 video games and you take those home on playing but and often mixed in with those were actual sometimes full versions, but sometimes shareware versions of other games. And so I think my first introduction to shareware was on pirated discs of real games or of full games that I was bringing home. And the concept kind of like fascinated me.

We had a copy, for example, of this very early. I know, sometime in the mid-80s, but we had a copy of PC file laying around which you mentioned in your book, Richard. You know, PC file everybody had, I think, if you had DOS. because it was most people didn't need a more powerful database. And it was free in theory.

And I remember it would be like, hey, it's asking for money. I didn't have a checkbook. So I wasn't sending money off to people for these things. They were just these kind of crippled programs or partial programs or sometimes full programs with a beg screen or a nag screen. And I'd say that 80% of the video games and programs I owned were shareware. for a good people for a lot of my life um you could by the by the golden age of it you could walk into the grocery store line and there were three and a half inch floppies of shareware sitting

there next to the candy bars you're like yeah okay you know i don't know bass tour fishing game that sounds good okay i only got six lakes but and you know what i played i played so much bastero it was really good and um i think the one that that breaks through the one that absolutely rocked me was scorched earth um that's where i started being like hey How do we pay for this? Dad, let's talk about the checkbook because we need to unlock everything in this game. But that's a short summary of a short enthusiastic summary. Shareware I have warm feelings for.

And those are convoluted with my fairly warm feelings for stealing other people's video games in the 1980s. So for myself, reading through Shareware Heroes, I realized that My first real experience with shareware was in my junior high computer lab. We mostly had, for some reason, in West Texas, we mostly had BBC micros. I have no idea how these UK-based computers ended up in a West Texas junior high school computer lab. But they were there. But also, there were a few Macintoshes. And on one of those Macintoshes, someone had installed.

called Scarab of Raw, which I thought was really fascinating and really cool. But I didn't, you know, I didn't really have much exposure to Max at that point. Like, I would see them at schools and occasionally, like, I'd see them on a desk at my friend's house when I went over, but never actually got to use it. So it was just one of those things that I just kind of assumed it was, you know, part of the whole system, you know, like for some reason, the school had bought this video game. But I think someone had just installed it without permission. on that Mac, and the lab teacher was so checked out that she didn't care. So, you know, that was kind of my first view of shareware,

but my first real experience was in college, you know, as I kind of gradually became acclimated to my own Mac, and, you know, this was around the time 94, 95, that the Internet became a thing through the World Wide Web. I started to encounter software in like the computer lab and online and around this time, you know, the Mac magazine started to include CD-ROMs that you could, you know, just put in and read some articles, but also that would contain tons of shareware demos. So it went from like, you know, Feast to Famine, or actually Famine to Feast. I was just suddenly inundated with all kinds of shareware. Like a lot of them I don't even remember the names.

there was this one shooter, it was a Galaxian rip-off, but the thing that really stood out to me is that they had included a sample from a Peter Gabriel song in there where Peter Gabriel was going, oh, oh! It's from the beginning of not one of us. And like whenever you die,

I think it was supposed to be like a bird sound, but it was actually Peter Gabriel making this hooping sound, whooping sound. So at some point I eventually realize, like, oh, yeah, this little pop-up that shows up, that's telling me that this is supposed to be paid for, and I started to gain a better understanding of what shareware was. So eventually, you know, I started sending money into, once online purchasing became available, it became much

easier. But for, for interesting software, probably the first thing I ever paid money for was to unlock INS, you know, an NES emulator for Macintosh. So even though I was paying legitimate money, it was for illicit purposes, you know, pirating software and playing, you know, NES games that I didn't own. So, you know, it's all a little sorted. But nevertheless, it was just kind of like, just everywhere. And, you know, there were some developers that I enjoyed their games back of the day who were still active, like exile, spider web software. That's it. Richard Vogel, I think is his name. I've interviewed him before, but it's been a long time. Jeff Vogel, that's it. Yes. You know, he's still kind of revisiting and building on

the classic shareware games he was making in the 90s and, you know, revisiting them with better graphics and more complex play. So, you know, clearly it's a, it's a thing that still has some legs. But, yeah, you know, for someone who mostly played console games and kind of came late into the, uh, the computing world and came at it from the wrong angle, you know, using Macs, um, I missed out on some of the big things that are, you know, really covered in depth in shareware heroes like, you know, Apagee stuff and Doom. geez, like we didn't even get Doom until after Doom 2 on Max

because it was just all backward and horrible. Jeremy, did you ever play Escape Velocity? Did you ever grab? I did, yes. That's a great Max Sherwer game. Oh, my God. Escape velocity is brilliant. And Matt Birch, the guy who made it, is really, really nice guy.

I've chatted to him a number of times. He ended up being an engineer at Garmin doing embedded operating system stuff, which is pretty cool. But escape velocity, I've told the story before. It's a really fun story. He developed that game from a memory of what he dreamed Elite Must Be, because when he was a kid, he bought Elite, and he was riding home from the store on his bike.

And then he got home and he realized that somewhere along, the way he dropped the copy protection thing. There was this prism thing you had to look at to unscramble the code. And so he couldn't play this game he'd just bought. He went back to the store and they wouldn't let him return it because it wasn't complete. And so all he could do was read the manual over and over and over again, thinking, wow, this must be an amazing game. And so then when he did Escape Velocity, it was a 2D version.

of those imaginings combined with a bunch of personal influences like reading model rocket catalogs and reading E.E. Smith, Doc Smith novels growing up, stuff like that. That's like a tragic superhero origin story. Like Uncle Ben has nothing on this. Like, oh, wow. With great pining comes great responsibility. So, Kyle, what about you? Yeah, you mentioned Doom, and I remember we had a PC, and I kept hearing about Doom. I was mainly a console player, but everyone was talking about Doom. It was the hot thing you had to try it. And, you know, I was in Babbage's and the full version of Doom, I don't know, $50, $60 big box thing.

It was like, oh, man, I don't have that much. And then we're at the checkout line for something else, and they have this stack of three and a half inch floppies in a little standy, and it's like shareware Doom, $5. $5. And I was like, what is shareware? And I looked at it. It was like, $5, I can afford that. So I'll try this out. And, you know, if I had a BBS or something, I could have downloaded it for free. But $5 was still a steal. And I remember, I was thinking, oh, you know, for $5, this must be like a time limited demo or something or it's going to be the first level. And, you know, then it's going to say buy the full game. But it had like a bunch of levels, like the entire first episode, if I remember. and I was like this I wasn't that good at the game

so I was like this is plenty this kept me busy for weeks and weeks and at the end I was like okay you know I could spend $50 for more levels but I feel like I got more than my $5 money's worth

I felt like I was getting away with something so that was my first introduction and then my main shareware memory is at one of those computer fairs this was in the mid-90s I guess It was at the fairgrounds every weekend. And my dad took me a lot of the stuff I couldn't care about, but there was this one booth

and it advertised like 600 games on one CD-ROM. And I was like, 600 games. You know, if 90% of them are crap, this is the best deal in the history of games. And it was like $20 or something? Was it manned? Was this booth man to buy a man in an overall with cigar? Is it the same booth that Jared is talking about? It was the same type of booth.

For sure. I remember like a bushy beard and the guy, the guy couldn't care. I was super excited to be getting 600 games and this guy was like, get this kid away from my booth. I just need to talk to adults. And yeah, this wasn't cracked versions games. This was legitimate. All of them seemed to be actually shareware. But again, it was the kind of thing where some of these games, the free shareware version was more than enough for me at, you know, 13, 14. And, you know, there were Ripple. Offs of Pac-Man and asteroids and Buster Brothers that I played over and over again. And there was Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jack Rabbit and Commander Keen and all these games where the shareware version was plenty. And just having 600 games in my hands at that age, it was like, I finally have an entry into PC gaming. I just spent months just going through one at a time every game. And some of them would last five minutes and some of them would last over. week. And it was the best money I ever spent on PC gaming, I think. And finally, what about you, Richard?

I, like Jeremy, I grew up, I was using a Mac. And so I missed out on a lot of stuff that I covered in the book until fairly recently. Actually, I had played very little from Apogee or Epic until 10 years ago or so. And, I had played very little from Apogee or Epic. And, when I started to go back and look at the catalogs and learn about these cool games that I missed. But my earliest shareware memories were being really young and we just had these games on floppy disks. I've got no idea where they came from. But there were things like phrase craze plus, which was a Wheel of Fortune clone with digitized audio. And there was it was glider, which is sort of a puzzle game.

You got a paper airplane through a house and try and dodge a cat to get out the window. It's about 15 rooms. It's a really cool game. And a bunch of other shareware Mac things. And this was the heyday of interesting games being original to the Mac. So that was some really cool stuff and that made an impression on me. And somewhere along the way, I sort of realized that these are using something called shareware and shareware obviously meant that they wanted you to send in money if you liked it.

And most of these games didn't really have much of an incentive and I had no way to send the money anyway. I'm in Australia. I'm a really long way away from them. And so then I was not in a position to pay for any shareware until really after the heyday of shareware when I finally had my own way to pay for things online in the early 2000s. And even then, I barely had any money. I was still teenager, so I don't think I've ever registered a shareware game, even though I've written this book. I've registered some useful software and utilities, though,

and I've probably registered an emulator at some point, too. So that kind of So that kind of brings us to the big question that I think hangs over shareware, which is how did anyone ever think that this was a viable business model to create a game, give it away, and then hope and pray that people would, out of the kindness of their heart or, you know, some sense of ethics, just send your money. Yeah.

I mean, to answer that, I've really got to quickly give the context of where Shareware came from, which is that in the early 80s, you had these three different guys all sort of independently invent shareware. and one of them came up with the shareware name. The others came up with other names. There was user-supported software and really confusingly freeware, which no one else could use because it was trademarked.

And freeware later on became a way to say that something is completely free. But each of these guys had the same idea of, well, what if I just give this thing away? I don't really care that much about making money from it. What if I give it away and I add some little incentives like you'll get a manual because these are productivity apps. PC file was one of them. And it worked really, really well. They all made heaps of money. They became millionaires. And so then other people went, oh, this shareware thing,

that's interesting. And they started making their own apps under the shareware model and didn't generally work very well. Most shareware was a dismal failure, and it became a running joke. Shareware doesn't work. Nobody pays for shareware. And games had it the worst, because who's going to pay for a game? You get the game, you play the game, you've had your fun. What are you going to pay for?

You have no reason to pay the money. Until Scott Miller comes along, and he founded Apogee, he has this cool idea. or what if I just give you part of the game away? What if I break it into episodes? And so he revolutionized shareware as a way to sell games because finally he came up with a method that actually resulted in making money. I think the most successful shareware game before Apogee came along only made like $10,000 and that was a huge hit.

And there were only a couple of those that pulled that off. One of them was on the Mac, actually, Captain Magneto. It's a pretty cool adventure game. So that was the trick. You give something useful to people who pay money. And very often that was, we're going to give you two more episodes or four more episodes, and you can pay $10 per episode, or you can pay $20 for a whole set, or whatever the pricing model they have is.

and we'll let you register the thing free of charge as part of this deal. And registration would just get you a disc and a manual, the usual stuff. That worked remarkably well and got copied by heaps of people. Epic did the same thing. It's software they started working for Apogee. Wolfenstein 3D was published by Apogee and then they realized, well, we've learned everything we need to know. So we're going to make Doom on our own now.

And most of the successful shareware games used that model. Some other games didn't, and they didn't make much money. I mean, scorched earth, which was mentioned before, brilliant game. The guy had never really made any real money from it. In an interview once, he said that he got enough to pay for Rahman in college. And that was it. So if shareware wasn't really a financial success for anyone between, you know, those initial releases that made millions of dollars and Apogee's model, that's like nearly a decade spanning

in there, why did people keep using that approach? Like, what was the appeal there? What was the thinking? Was it just like the Vegas node again? Like, just tickling that gamble node? I think very often it was a way to get your software to market without having to go through the effort of finding a legitimate publisher, which is a very hard thing to do. And a lot of people would sort of, they would get, they would be that gambling thing. They'd get the stars in their eyes and go, wow, you can make millions of dollars with shareware. I'm going to make my program shareware. and not realizing that their program is absolute crap and nobody in their right mind would pay for it and probably wouldn't even want to want it to be given to them. You'd have to pay them to take it from you. It's so bad.

So that was the reality. There was a huge gulf between what people thought their programs were worth and what they actually were worth and things that were good did earn a bit of money generally and how much money they earned dependent on. on how effectively they used the business model, if indeed they even cared about making money, because not everyone releasing shareware wanted to make money. Some of them just wanted to put a thing out and get some appreciation back from other people. That's all they wanted. Their registrations were about being acknowledged

and that these people like my game. Great. Richard, I'm curious, when it came to the Apogee model and what came after, and other people trying this as well. Was there ever a thought that, when it comes to things like Doom, giving away the first episode, which is the best part of the game, just giving that away completely? Was there ever thinking on the parts of some of these companies that, in addition to the money they'd make on the game, just the buzz of having a game explode and become societally ubiquitous, well-known,

would be enough to get them in a better publishing position the next time around? Like, was it, were they willing to lose some money here to make themselves more appealing to a publisher or to retailer relationships later on? Yeah, definitely. That kind of thing would happen. Often people who are making quite ambitious, ambitious shareware games, they hoped that they could make games for a living. And shareware was an easy way into the market. There aren't that many cases that I remember coming across of people specifically go. going, okay, I will release this game as shareware, and it will be my, my demo to get a publisher,

but plenty of people thought that shareware could be a stepping stone for them on the way into being a proper professional developer. That sort of pipeline thing was maybe more common in the public domain scene, which is related to shareware, but that involved giving your stuff away completely free. And that was a really big pipeline in the UK and Europe for people getting into working at software houses. Lots of people would make public domain demos to show off their amazing coding skills or their awesome music. They're doing mod soundtracks. And so they'd make something cool and release it to the PD libraries that were all the rage over there.

Did shareware ever become a, you know, kind of widespread viable format? I feel like in the 90s, it must have been, not format, but model. You know, you had the advent of the Apogee model. And I think Doom is kind of the, you know, the really famous success story there. And that's tied in with the rise of the internet because, you know, people were able to download Doom from an FTP in addition to going to the store and buying, you know, a memo disk that would unlock the full game. But also the advent of CD-ROM and the fact that it was so inexpensive to manufacture CD-ROMs that magazines would just give those away and they would contain potentially hundreds of shareware games on them. You know, with those factors involved. Oh, and also, you know, online payments that I mentioned before. Like, that's, I feel like surely, surely the format must have turned some sort of corner. Do you think that was ever really really the case? Well, it was funny looking at it because it seems like the heyday of shareware was actually the early 90s before the internet was really prevalent and before you were getting

heaps of pack-in CD cover mounts on magazines or these massive 600 game collections published on CD and it's because there was just enough connectivity happening. Enough people were able to dial into BBSs and enough people knew about shareware. And now these distribution deals, you'd be able to buy Doom in any game store because it's software specifically encouraged people to pop Doom on a disk, put it in a box and sell it, and they're not going to ask for any money because they know that people are going to get hooked on Doom and they're going to register it and then it will get their money.

Or you could buy it from vending machines even. you could actually buy shareware discs from vending machines. And so it was very ubiquitous in that little period going just into the mid-90s. But then after that, even though payments became a lot easier with the advent of online payments being able to give your credit card online, people were really scared about doing online payments for a long time. They didn't want to put their credit card info into a website. They were afraid what's going to happen here.

And the surprising effect of CD-ROM was that it devalued shareware. You could get so many shareware games on a disc that people would still be playing the free shareware versions, and they'd have so many. You're going through 600 games. It's going to take a long time to finish going through those 600 games, and then finally choose a few that you want to register and play more. a lot of people when faced with that choice, so I can pay $10 on top of the $10 I've already spent on this CD,

or I can just keep playing these crappy free games, hoping that there's going to be another gem in there somewhere. And eventually there probably is. So the audience, the market hit critical mass right around the time that the actual medium, the material, the content, became oversaturated, is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately for people who were trying to do it.

And on top of that, actually, I've got to mention that Doom put shareware on the radar of big publishers. And so suddenly you had actual commercial companies releasing demos that they called shareware. That sounds familiar. I feel like, yeah, you see that happen from time to time where something small, all grassroots becomes all of a sudden visible, and then the corporations come in and ruin it. Yeah, looking back, I always, I feel like the shareware discs I always enjoyed the most were with Mac Addict magazine, because they did a really great job of curating every issue. You know, there would be interesting content. You know, I remember one issue, I think it was Mac Addict, where they included like beta builds or even Alpha builds.

of Bungy's Marathon. It was like, you know, kind of like the in-between point between pathways into darkness and Marathon. It was like, whoa, this is wild. This is like alternate reality stuff. But they didn't include just a huge number of shareware titles every month. It would be like, here's a selection of, you know, like six or eight really great games that we love. Try these out. These are, you know, really good stuff. And I feel like, you know, that was, they had a really great hit-miss ratio, and I would be much more likely to become engaged and, you know, spend time with the handful of games that they actually took the time to select as opposed to just saying, here you go, here's 200 games, do whatever, we don't care.

I would also speculate that another contributing factor, and Richard, you can let me know if I'm right or wrong about this, but is that in the late 90s to early 2000s, really that period when shareware begins to decline and before we have steam. The technology shifts that are affecting the console industry and shaking out a lot of developers are also creating a situation where it's much harder for one or two-person teams to create commercially viable PC and Mac games. 3D acceleration has taken off. Your art requirements have grown, your design requirements have grown, game scale is

grown, and the kinds of games that would have been shareware before, were not seen as cutting-edge viable any longer. Do you think that might have affected the decline, really until we get steam and the rise of the Indies a few years later? Absolutely. A lot of people who had been successful in the shareware realm, they either went commercial, they scaled up. They invested in larger teams so that they could keep making games

that would compete with what's happening, and they literally became commercial studios, which is basically what Id Software and Apogee and Ipacol did. They all scaled up and left the shareware scene. But other people who were, they were really just a one or two person shop and they didn't have the resources to scale up or they didn't have the interest in doing these sort of exciting 3D games.

They just phased out of the business because the gap between what they could do and what the market wanted was widening, and they realized that it's just not a viable business for them anymore. So shareware became a little cottage industry from the late 90s onwards, where it was almost entirely composed of people making weird little indie games and clones of popular games that are about learning how to, how to, how to code. Like, you make a minesweeper game and you put it out as shareware and hope that maybe you earn 20 bucks from a couple of registrations. So what would you say has filled, you know,

that void, the vacuum left behind by Cherow? What has taken its place? Like, what's the shape of things these days? Well, shareware, it never really, it never went away per se. It just evolved. And it it wasn't needed anymore as a term because what happened in the early 2000s was this rise of digital distribution. It became so much easier with things like PayPal coming along to do transactions online. And people started to just sell their games from their websites where they'd release a demo and gradually the name changed from shareware release to just demo release. And, then you could go to their site and pay the $20 to get the complete version. And they stopped using the term shareware because this brilliant new term came along that somehow nobody had thought

of until like 99 or 2000, indie. Indie games had been around since the 80s, but nobody had thought bizarrely to call them indie games, even though there was indie music and indie films. Nobody called them indie games until right around that turn of the millennium. And so shareware just stopped being used as a term. And the business model had already evolved out of the classic shareware sense and into this whole demo and full version where often the demo is more limited than in the early days where you'd get an episode of like seven, eight, ten levels in it. you'd get two, one or two episode, one or two level demo, and that's it. You've got to pay

if you want any more than that. And so then you've got that part, which still continues on today, just very rarely with a demo, and the rise of free-to-play, which was something triggered mainly from the rise of the mobile scene on iOS and Android, which is a whole different story. But basically today we have indie games, and we have free-to-play games, and it's all sort of murky and confused world. Is there a single point in history, a single moment that you would point to and say, this is it, this is where they took shareware off the ventilator? Or do you think it was a more gradual demise? I think it was pretty much a gradual thing. you could say that it happened around that turn of the millennium with so in in 2000 which is right

where I end the book you had the last widely recognized shareware game released which was from Seamus McNally who the IGF grand prize is named after he died sadly a game called Treadmarks which was a 3D a 3D vehicular combat game really cool. You could possibly put it there, but I don't know if that's really an accurate portrayal of things, because there were still people making a lot of money, calling their things shareware for a few more years after that. So I think it was sort of more a phase-out. So final question that I'm going to put to everyone, what is your favorite shareware game?

Like the one that you think is just the greatest thing or that you spent the most time playing. Doom has already been said. So let's not give that obvious answer. But I'd be curious to hear everyone's take. Kyle, you haven't had a lot to say this segment since it's been about, you know, someone else's book. So I'd be curious to get your take on this as the PC-owning video gamer.

So if we're extending shareware to include, like, Xbox Live Arcade games that have demos, there are probably a lot of things. I could choose, like, like, Geometry Wars. I played the demo a lot before I put it at $8. I think we should go with a classical definition and keep it to, you know, like, say, pre-2000 games on PC and Mac. That's fine. I think for me, it's probably Jazz Jack Rabbit was the one that I played the most. I remember thinking, I had a Super Nintendo, and I played Genesis at my friend's house,

and I remember Sonic the Hedgehog being the one game where I was like, oh, man, this is so cool. It's so fast. There's nothing like it on my system. And then I got this shareware version of Jazz Jack Rabbit. I'm like, oh, okay, this is, this is my version of Sonic now, because it's, it's kind of fast. It's, it's, you know, the screen scrolling really quick, and I beat that. And that was, I beat the shareware version. And that was the one time I really considered trying to jump through the hoops to register the game. But the idea of bugging my dad to get out the checkbook was, was too much of a filter still.

Okay. Jared, what about you? Well, we've already talked about scorched earth. and we've already talked about Escape Velocity. So how about ZZT? Because ZZT, nifty game in every way, but the fact that the editor came with the shareware version, I mean, the effect of the editor is what everybody ended up playing with anyway.

So that's just, that ZZT is where a lot of game designers cut their teeth for a few years. And a lot of them got this toolkit that let them do that completely free, thanks to shareware. You haven't explained what Zizi. Z.T is, though. That's not a, that's not like a kind of a, you know, basic run of your run of the mill everyday kind of game. Well, sure. Well, that ZCT is where Chris Kohler created his famous Yoshi game, which we all know and love, uh, today. Yeah, I, I think that's

what it's called. Yeah. Um, no, ZCT is a Asky text mode color, uh, IBM PC game that allows you to play simple top-down role-playing games using Yasky characters. It's not a roguelike. People think of, they see this and immediately think roguelike. No, it's for building structured RPGs, but it has an incredibly powerful editor that allows you to create your own RPGs. And top-down RPGs Ultima-style games using very simple graphics, but a very intuitive and just incredibly powerful editing system that required no programming, but had all the power the programming would give you. And it's where a whole lot of game designers learned game design.

That was created by... ZCT was Tim Sweeney, who went on to make a, you know, a little company called Epic that nobody ever heard of. It's basically Unreal Engine 0.0. Yeah. That's what it is. That's exactly it. Very earliest alpha.

That's right. The text mode version. For me, I don't know if it's the great. greatest. It's not the greatest. But the one that I probably spent the most time playing in the journalism lab in college was snood, which I played so much and only, you know, a few years later realized or discovered like, oh, this is actually just a straight rip-off of Taito's Bust a Move, which is much more charming and colorful and attractive. But, you know, not being aware of that and just stumbling across that on the campus network on, you know, when I was at school,

I was like, wow, this is just so addictive. I can't stop playing this. And it's really ugly and kind tacky looking, but I don't care because it's really fun. So yeah, my, that was probably the one that I sank the most time into it. I think at some point I did pay for a key for it. So I feel okay about that. But I've paid for many copies of Bustamove, puzzle bobble, so I feel okay about that, too. Like, Taito Taito got their cheddar.

In my freshman year of college, when I was playing a lot of Minesweeper, my roommate played hundreds of hours of snood, and I couldn't get into it as much, but I remember every time I walked in there, he was playing. I'm sure you remember, like, just constantly, snoo.

Yeah, coming right out of the speakers. I woke up to that a lot. The genius of snoot, we should probably mention, is that it took away the time limit. You could play it as slowly as you liked, so there was no pressure to quickly make your decision. And you could, people would actually think about what placement they're going to go next for their snood guy, which is the snood version of the bubbles. They would like spend hours thinking about where it would go. hours. Wow. It was like the puzzle mode, yeah.

Yeah, I want to say that puzzle bobble is also not, well, it is kind of time-based in the arcades, but it's actually more like move-based. You take X number of moves and then the screen, you know, descends. But I guess some of the arcade versions do have timers. So, yeah, that is a big difference. But still, very ugly game, you know, definitely not created by an illustrator. But that's okay. You know, it didn't stop me from just sinking.

tons of time into it when I should have been doing something more constructive. What about you, Richard? Just to kind of wrap this up, we'll once again bring it home by asking you. What's your pick? There are heaps of things that I could name. I mean, I've spent lots of time playing Alastomaniow, which is really cool, sort of elastic puzzle thing. You're controlling a bike that can flip around and do crazy stuff and go upside down. And there's this amazing competitive scene nowadays for that. I mentioned Glider earlier, which is one of my favorite games of all time. That later became a commercial thing.

Harry the Handsome Executive is probably my favorite on the Mac side, having grown up as a Mac person. That's a really weird thing. You control this guy who is a middle management type at a giant company called Scumco. you need to save the world from from office equipment that has become sentient and wants to destroy you, which is really funny and weird game. You scoot around on a swivel chair the whole time. But my favorite, I think, is actually when I discovered while working on the book was an Atari ST game called Grandad and the Quest for the Holy Vest. It's a graphic adventure.

It's so cool. You control this old guy in a wheelchair. And it's a wheelchair, old guy in a wheelchair, because the developer felt like he didn't have the memory to do animated sprites. So what can you create that doesn't animate and is a character or a guy in a wheelchair? You can just slide it around. And it's a really funny game. It's inspired by all the classic Sierra games, just a whole lot less evil. And, and, and, and, you know, British made, so it's got some pretty wacky humour in it too. All right. So shareware, yeah, where can we find and acquire for ourselves, you know, send you money to unlock the full version of Shareware Heroes? The best way to do that is probably to start at my website, which I made, styled after an old DOS application, sharewareheroes.com. That website, that website is amazing to navigate it around. I love, I love just looking at it. You can also go to your local computer fair and pay a guy in overalls with a cigar for a copy, but he doesn't get the money.

Richard doesn't see a dime. That sounds like a bad deal. All right. So, yeah, that wraps it up for this episode. Thanks both Richard and Kyle for taking the time to come on to this episode and, you know, not just talk about your books, but also talk about the topics being covered. neither of which we've really discussed in any depth on retronauts before. So I appreciate you both taking time out of your days. And also you, Jared, thank you.

So we're going to wrap this up by doing the usual shoutout. I will tell those of you listening at home that you can listen to Retronauts every week on the Internet for free by going to cool download places like, I don't know, wherever you get podcasts from these days. I'm sure they're just handing them out like candy. So check it out Retronauts. but you can also

you can listen to every episode a week early without advertisements in higher audio quality by going to patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribing for three bucks a month if you subscribe for five bucks a month not only do you get that you also get

patron exclusive episodes every other Friday and every weekend you get a bonus mini podcast and column by Diamond Fight and you get Discord access So really, that extra $2, which doesn't really buy much these days, like two eggs, that's a pretty damn good deal. So check that out, patreon.com slash retronauts.

Richard, besides sharewareheroheroes.com, where can people find you on the internet to follow you, stalk you, discuss things with you? Maybe not stalk. I'm pretty inactive these days on Twitter, but you can find me on the Fediverse, which is the big new thing now. Nowadays, lots of people are signed on to Mastodon. I'm at Mossarcy at social.mosarci.comi. I self-hosted. So you can find me there. And you can follow my work via some newsletter thing that I created.

Just go to massarc.mee.mee. And you'll find what you need. And how do you spell that? M-O-S-S-R-C.m-E. All right. And Kyle, how about you? I'm still writing articles for Ars Technica after 11 years, so you can check out my daily work there. I'm still on Twitter for now at Kyle ORL until hopping ship, hopefully, to a better alternative once everyone else does. I'm also on Mastodon, Kyle ORL at mastodon.com.

dot social. Jared Petty? Yeah, I'm Jared over at Limited Run Games, doing Limited Run Game stuff. In addition to these gentlemen's wonderful books, so we just published a really nice book on the Atari VCS that's just gone on sale. So if you want to go to Limited Run Games.com and you have an interest in the VCS, check that out. I think you'll really enjoy it.

It's by Kevin Bunch, and it's wonderful, and we did a Retronauts episode about it. Beyond that, I got off Twitter a few months ago, so I don't know. Just wave if you see me. And finally, you can find me at Limited Run Games, as Jared mentioned. You can also find me on Retronauts, as I mentioned. And, of course, I have my video channel on YouTube called Jeremy Parrish. And I talk about an old video game or two or three every week in a video. It's very exciting.

I talk just like this, so you fall asleep. Yeah, I think that's it. So please check out Shareware Heroes and Mind Sweeper by Boss Fight Books, both excellent books, full of great research, history, just very engaging. And if you enjoy learning about old video games and like, why would you be listening to this podcast if you weren't? It's going to be right down your alley. I'm not shy about supporting. People who don't publish through limited run games. We're not competitors.

We're all peers and all passengers together on this great journey into video game history. We are the retronauts. Thanks, everyone. We'll be back in a week with an episode, unless, of course, you're a patron, in which case we'll be back sooner. We're going to be able to be able to be. BORANI. BORANI, BORAN.

THEIRMANI, THEIRMANI, Thank you.