I remember playing Jill of the Jungle in early 1997, it was on one of those "100 in 1" pirate CD that were common around the time the CD-ROM was introduced (became somewhat common in my region).
That same pirate compilation had Commander Keen, Dune 2 and many other games.
Shareware was big back then. Chances are good that your copy was actually legal.
I had a bunch of those myself back then, dozens of great shareware games on each disc. Sure beat trying to download something on slow slow dialup.
And those games usually got really really hard beyond the first episode, so we (at least me) wouldn't have gotten far in the full games anyways.
Dune 2 at least wasn't shareware.
Maybe had a demo though. There were a few discs that had shareware and playable demos.
Doesn't sound like what they had, though. Especially if it had episodes 2 and 3, etc.
Did you enjoy Jill back then?
I did. Only ever played the shareware episode, but it was one of my favourite platformers, alongside Duke Nukum and Cosmo.
It was all right. It was fun to try something new.
I was more into RPGs and strategy games even back then.
I love that all those games are now being ported to retro consoles. I have all the Commander Keen games in my pocket for when I feel like fighting aliens.
100 sounds low, they tended to be 300-600 per CD, and all shareware not pirated, so perfectly legal and encouraged. I had multiple such disks as a kid… the jank in how to get the games working (dos and win3.1, mostly) was what got me to learn to use computers back in the day.
Good post, OP. I played the crap out of platformers like this. I even wrote a saved game generator for the Duke Nukem platformer (which used the same pattern as Prince of Persia).
Fortnite ... was one of the main drivers of the tech industry’s obsession with the “metaverse” in the early 2020s.
Citation needed.
Did I completely miss something? What the fuck does Fortnite have to do with Zuck's stupid metaverse idea stolen from 80s & 90s cyberpunk?
From what I remember in Folding Idea's Decentraland video essay, they were trying to push metaverse stuff in fortnite pretty hard. Selling tickets to exclusive "live" concerts and the like (which were prerecorded btw). Z-man was just one of many trying to make it a Thing, when it clearly is just an exploitative gimmick
Oh, right. I completely forgot about the Fortnite "concerts". Thanks for the reminder. They were so obviously doomed to fail right from the beginning, lol.
Funny timing, I'm actually playing through the games right now. I had forgotten about the little quips it has about the game industry!
Feels so different using a gamepad on a modern PC, I still remember playing it as a kid with a keyboard and CGA graphics. The shareware version of course, ha.
Back before the grease and Tencent took over his brain, Tim gave me all three on floppy for free when I thanked him for making it and ZZT.
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