My Return to Shareware

I’ve been thinking a lot about the games that inspired me to make games. At the risk of being a video game hipster, you probably haven’t heard of them.

There’s a big gap in my first-hand knowledge of console games. I came of age in the Third Generation of consoles with the Nintendo Entertainment System. I was a big fan, like all my friends. A Nintendo Power subscriber. We didn’t have an NES at home, but I got to play it at my grandparents’ house on Sundays. As a Nintendo kid, I was super excited to get the Super Nintendo, which was my console of choice throughout middle school. Finally, Ninten-Did what Genesis did with 16-bit graphics. I put a lot of hours into Pocky & Rocky and made unlistenable music in Mario Paint.

During high school, I lost interest in console gaming. I skipped N64, GameCube, and the rival PlayStation and Xbox lines. When I was in my 20s, I finally used my adult-ass money to return to consoles, buying two systems in the Seventh Generation: Wii and Xbox 360. (I also got a used PlayStation 2, but as a DVD player.)

Did I stop playing games in high school and college? No, I just migrated to computer games. PC games were hot at my school. Doom, Quake, and Diablo were all hits among my friends. All legendary games. I didn’t play any of them. Yes, PC games were cool as hell, but I didn’t have a PC. Ours was an Apple house.

I went from a Nintendo Power subscriber to a MacAddict subscriber. We had an Apple IIgs growing up, followed by the Performa 575, Performa 6200CD, and a beautiful Bondi Blue iMac. I liked the easy of use, the focus on creativity, and the feeling of being part of a (highly commercialized) “outsider” culture. I’m not a boring old PC user. I’m not an office drone or a puppet for Micro-sucks Win-blows. I’m the sort of person who “Think Different.”

I always liked Nintendo, but I wouldn’t argue with a Sega person. I thought both the Genesis and the SNES were cool. It was always fun to go over to my friend Jon’s house and play Altered Beast. But when it came to Mac vs. PC, I would sacrifice my life on Mac Mountain to defend Computerland against the horde of MS-DOS invaders who wanted me to C Prompt, whatever that meant.

Unlike a game console, I needed a computer for school. How could I school without one?? Yeah, I was writing papers on them and doing research on the World Wide Web. (You better list actual books as sources for your research paper, because the teacher will circle those URLs in red ink on your bibliography.) I also used my Macs for creative ends, like building websites, making music in ProTools, and writing comedy sketches. Despite the tone I started this paragraph with, there were legitimately enriching reasons for me to have a Mac. But much of the time? I was gaming on that beige bad boy.

The Mac became my de facto gaming console in the 90s.

Mac gaming was a weird scene. On consoles and PC in the 90s, there were plenty of polished games to choose from. Doom, Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, GoldenEye, the list goes on. Back then, Macs were a niche player in the computer industry. We had a 5% market share for operating systems, so a lot of big titles were never ported to Macs. I remember playing some big computer games, like SimCity and Wolfenstein 3D, but those weren’t the games that defined this period of my life.

Two Words: Glider Pro.

Most humans on Earth will have no idea what I’m talking about, but for Mac gamers who came of age in the 90s, I bet it’s a little thrilling to read the words “Glider Pro” in 2026. Here’s more nostalgia for my fellow recovering MacAddicts: Spectre, Spin Doctor, Escape Velocity, Maelstrom, Crystal Quest, Snood. Every game by Ambrosia Software! HyperCard stacks! What else do I have to saaaaaay? 🎹 🔥

Most of the games I played were Mac shareware games. I feel like shareware is an old enough concept that I should explain for any readers born after Space Jam. Shareware was a loose business model for games and other software. Shareware games were usually complete games the player was encouraged to share. You’d often find them on the early internet and on demo disc CD-ROMs. I found most of my shareware from this era on America Online, a long forgotten P2P BBS service called Hotwire, and MacAddict discs.

Often the game had additional content, like bonus levels or a level editor. In the early days, you would mail the game studio a physical, paper check. Six to eight weeks later, the studio would send you back a physical diskette of what we would now call DLC. People were skeptical about putting their credit card numbers into their computers for a long time, and credit card processing was an expensive and time consuming proposition back then. Later on, you would send a check and the studio would email you an unlock code, which you’d put into the game to unlock the bonus stuff. A hybrid of electronic and snail mail! Heady days!

I use the term “studio” loosely. Shareware games were often made by one person, the solo developer. The graphics were a little janky. The sound effects were ripped directly from movies and TV shows. If the games had any narrative, they were usually pretty simplistic. Sometimes they were just clones of popular arcade games where Microsoft icons were the enemies. I was far from the only Mac evangelist out there.

Yes, shareware games could be crude, but they also had a lot going for them. They had off-the-wall concepts. In Glider Pro, you play as a paper airplane traveling through hazards in a precarious house. In Harry the Handsome Executive, you played an office worker scooting around on a swivel chair. Smile: the Splattering was a digital toy where you mutilated a smiley face in funny and disturbing ways. These games had a human-made charm to them. They were the video game equivalent to folk art or photocopied zines. Mac shareware had personality. These games were quirky, often funny, and hand-coded. Perfect for a weird high school kid looking for new media that spoke to me as an emerging creative.

I didn’t go to hardcore shows or the skate park. I played Oxyd in my bedroom. More than that! I made maze games in HyperCard, coding and drawing them myself, and uploaded them to AOL. Those lost projects were my very first attempts at game dev. I also wrote a column for the kids section of my local paper reviewing shareware games. When it came to titles like Swoop and Shufflepuck Café, I was more than a player. I was a teenage connoisseur.

Last week, I wrote about how I was searching for a distribution method for my indie projects. Something between the pressure of a polished commercial release and only showing the prototype to friends. I think I’m going to start making shareware games, in the shareware tradition. I want to make short, simple, weird games in 2-3 months. Longer than a game jam, but shorter than a passion project I devote years of my life to make. I want these games to feel like they were made by a person. Not a studio, and certainly not AI. A human with a goofy vision. These games will likely be rough around the edges with low budgets, and that’s ideal. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s self-expression. The games will either be cheap or payment optional. Probably hosted on itch.io? Or maybe I’ll distribute them on CD-ROM?! Or maybe this whole post is just a way to convince myself to buy a vintage G3 iBook for “research” purposes?!? It wouldn’t be the first time I owned a Mac just to play games on it.

Anyway, thanks for letting me share. 💾

🎲 Your Turn: I hope someone reading this was a Mac gamer. If you were, I need to know what kind of Mac you had and what games you played! And okay, fine. PC gamers, you’re invited to comment about your favorite shareware games, too. Just don’t mention Clippy or Steve Ballmer in the comments. Yuck!