Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all.

(There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. The argument being that $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for a single shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)

"The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]."

While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting on Friday, and the crack available when I checked back on Monday. Even apps that needed a physical dongle for the ADB port were cracked and not just the apps that needed a key typed in to unlock. Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.

As soon as I saw "Quake Shareware" in the title of this post, I thought "Pray to the one you will pay!" which was what appeared on the screen when you ran QCRACK.

I always wondered why Final Doom didn't unlock with QCRACK - I always assumed it was a bug with the keygen, never realized it wasn't possible to purchase it from the disk at all!

It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

I remember Microsoft had a time limited version of Office on cd-rom that was sold for a couple bucks at Kinko's. You could replace a .dll in it and that removed the time limit.

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "

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The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!

In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.

> A gamer could go to any of the hundreds of CompUSA/Computer City stores and buy the CD for $9.95.

I'm pretty sure I bought it for $6.66

Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.

Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?

Man, those CompUSA and Computer City pictures take me back. Spent too much time there (when the 7300 was my regular Mac, the CompUSA "Apple store" was my primary source of software). Probably still have some of those free Computer City floppies in a drawer somewhere.

Man, if I were id, I'd sue the hell out of Testdrive for selling me that broken security system...

I was wondering how it was economical to burn every CD with a different key. Turns out it was not!

The "incredibly expensive Intel Pentium" image link 404s.

That box art is so cool. They don't make em like they used to!

Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"?

By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?

If you were to do this today, how could you make it foolproof?

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This screw up ended up costing id Software millions in sales. With the Doom franchise they only included the first episode in the shareware version. But to save a buck I guess they decided this was better than mailing a second CD with the full game on it. Then doubling down on that greed by putting their entire game library on the disc. This is right about the time John Romero and John Carmack parted ways, can't help but wonder if this debacle played a role. And by all accounts Quake's development was painful, so imagine this happens after going through hell getting a game out the door.

Okay, I haunted CompUSA in my teen years and I purchased my first 386 system there. So the photograph included in this blog seems bona fide.

Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing Images research. There are no serious search hits. Gemini is giving some truly b.s. explanations that I do not believe.

Is this a concrete example of a USA store tolerating mis-branded signage... inside their own store? Or is it some third-world knockoff? The merch on the shelves, the bros shopping for themselves, the tie-wearing salesmen, they all seem totally legit. What kind of big-box computer store lets that happen to their signage?