After this the entire game industry was convinced that a free playable demo was an important marketing tool and I’m proud to have been the first one to be subjected to this marketing experiment. Later I ported the game to the Commodore Amiga and someone else ported it to the Sega Genesis system.
We made a full version of the game that you could play completely but, of course, only a single ‘game level’ or ‘mission’ was provided.Īt that years COMDEX there were actually billboards in Las Vega with our game splashed across it! Over the coming months Maxell sold over a million boxes of floppy disks, each one containing a fully playable version of our game! This soon led to my first game, ‘688 Attack Sub’, to become #1 on the bestseller list for several months and to sell over 150,000 copies which, at the time, was considered a huge hit. Why would anyone do that? Why would anyone buy the game if they could play it for free? Now that my game was ready to release, and it didn't have a lot of money invested in it, they decided to let me be the guinea pig. It seemed completely insane to give away a fully playable version of a game. Electronic Arts marketing talked to a number of teams about this idea but no one was really very interested. One of the largest manufacturers of floppy disks at the time was Maxell and they had approached Electronic Arts with this crazy idea of putting a fully playable computer game on an extra free 11th floppy disk in each box. Floppy disks were the primary way that people who owned computers back then would store their data and games. At that time there were a number of companies making a lot of money selling floppy disks. What happened next is a little bit of gaming history. Now that the game was finally ready to ship the new problem we faced is that Electronic Arts didn't have any interest in putting a lot of money behind the marketing effort. Update 3: For more files like this, search for "RBBS in a box" over at Update 2: Soon I am buying 1,000 5.25" PC floppies from a guy locally which if they contain anything interesting, I will share here. ARC archives, I found a tool called Filzip from about 2006 that managed to open those under Windows 7. Find 6 formatted floppy disks if you are using 1.4 megabyte floppies, or 7 if you. FLI animations, so if that stuff offends you, steer clear. A special program is used to write the image files to floppy disk in raw mode. Note: As far as I know this is all shareware or freeware, roughly organized into whatever BBS they downloaded it from.
The result is in this archive I am sharing: Knowing their historical value, I copied the files off several hundred of these floppies for the sake of history before succumbing to fatigue. Many of the disks contained shareware downloads from various BBSes in that area, mostly from the late 80s to about 1994. A couple of years ago I bought about 3,000 floppy disks from a guy in Los Angeles who once ran a PC shareware company.