20 years of Wolfenstein 3D: shareware model in games

May 5 marks 20 years since the release of the cult game Wolfenstein 3D , the founder of the first-person shooter genre. The game has sold around the world in a huge number of copies, but not everyone remembers that the game was actually distributed in the shareware model. The first episode of 10 levels was copied free of charge on a BBS, and people brought the game to each other on diskettes. It was also one of the first games that was distributed via the Internet.

The first version of Wolfenstein 3D for DOS was released on May 5, 1992, three years after the appearance of Intel 486 processors.

The developer of Wolfenstein 3D was id Software with John Carmack and John Romero, and the publisher was Apogee Software, later known as 3D Realms. It is considered to be a pioneer in using the shareware model.
')
Immediately after its foundation in 1987, Apogee Software released several games using this scheme: the user received the full version of the game with all levels, and if he liked the game, he could pay for it. For this money, he received technical support and, possibly, some souvenirs. This model was not very successful, so very quickly the company changed its approach. They began to distribute only the first few levels of the game to the BBS. After payment, the player received the remaining levels (floppy disks in the mail), technical support and cheat codes. This model is called the "Apogee method".

By the way, Carmack and Romero started making games commissioned by Apogee before the founding of their own company, id Software, while working at Softdisk. It was thanks to Apogee and the belief in the PC shareware model that they decided to set up their own studio.

Wolfenstein 3D was an absolute hit that clearly demonstrated that shareware is a very effective distribution method. By the end of 1993, more than 100,000 copies of Wolfenstein 3D were sold.



The game is still sold through Steam , although John Carmack has long published the source code for Wolfenstein 3D, like all the rest of his games.