A thousand times this.
Most of my long-time followers know I started SAGE (the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, which started to celebrate Sonic fan games, but is increasingly a venue for indie developers to show their original games as well).
I retired from managing SAGE many, many (MANY) years ago, but I have continued to cover the event in some form. And when I was younger, and still felt like the Sonic fangaming community was full of peers and friends that I personally knew, it was a lot easier to be snarky and yell about how "this game sucks!"
But as I grew up and got older, my perspective began to shift to this "Everyone starts somewhere" vibe. Because, I mean, when you're playing a game that might be some 14 year old's first foray in to any game development, the fact they have moving characters and recognizable gameplay is at all is a feat.
Yes, Unity and GameMaker and Construct and whatever else make it so game creation is easier now than it ever was before. But it's still not that easy. And just like how a lot of younger artists start out by redrawing existing artwork as a learning mechanism, you're going to see a lot of first-time game developers remaking their own version of something established.
They are making an effort to learn something, and that's enough.
Say what you will about Todd MacFarlane, but he started out as a kid doing cruddy-looking Spider-man doodles in the margins of 5th grade school notebooks.
Everyone starts somewhere.
even the silliest barely-playable fangames show so much heart. if you're seasoned enough yourself, you can often identify their influences better than they can, and then boom: you're thinking about a kid sitting at their computer so excited about the story of sonic adventure 2, or the never-released game they just learned about, or whatever else inspired them enough to pick up The Games Factory and start banging Active Objects together until they approximate something resembling a game.
it's a real manifestation of the "passion" for game development people can have, not just the weasel-word the industry uses to mean "okay with crunch."
and in this light, that guy on youtube that makes a bit out of playing Sonic fangames to poke fun at them and doesn't know how to turn off sticky-keys on his computer is so transparently a pathetic fucking loser.
(of course, i'm saying this all from the perspective of someone who grew up in the Sonic fangaming and reverse-engineering communities many years ago - that's how i started out too, and now people tell me my skills terrify them.)
Given that I've seen this site described as "the internet retirement community for people who collected AOL CD-ROMs", I'm going to hazard a guess that few people really require much information about what shareware compilations were, but there might be someone with a different enough background here that it's worth going into. Anyway, back in the days when the PC multimedia standard was put forward, the internet didn't look much like it did now. Instead of "websites" connectivity online was done through mailing lists and BBSes. In a way, a BBS is reminiscent of what modern corporatized social media is, but more distributed. In practice these sites were webforums or chat rooms, file hosting sites, and sometimes even MMO (or at least, well, MO, not necessarily able to handle large communities of players) games. If that sounds like what people want the metaverse or web 3.0 to be, yeah, go figure that tech bros have reinvented old technology but with new exciting forms of rent-seeking attached to it.
Anyway, that thing about file hosting? Is pretty significant. Let's say you make a game or some software and want to sell it. How are you going to find an audience? Then, as now, the obvious answer is to harness the power of the internet. Sure, you could print up some floppy disks and find local distributors, and some people did do stuff like this, but there's a lot of overhead costs, and not necessarily a reason to believe that you'd get anybody buying it. So, sell your software online, and for basically no additional overhead than the kinds of communication you'd need to get people to even see an ad for your game in the first place -- why not give out a demo, and encourage people to put them on as many BBSes as possible? Wide audience means more sales, after all. Thus was the shareware model of software developed -- free demos for all, tiny ASCII art text files for some.
Of course, given that the shareware can be downloaded, nothing can stoppy the copy to floppies. So you can still share stuff via physical media, and people did. Anyone could -- and some tried to do it commercially using models like the ones at storefronts like I suggested above. When you're doing it at scale, the distribution costs become a little less of an issue, and you get to be editorial about it, potentially, and sharing the best of the internet to people who may not have a reliable, or any, internet connection; dial-up and large downloads, I assure you, mix about as well as oil and vinegar -- floppy sharing is the mustard emulsion helping all that data move together. Of course, not everyone wants to pay for a demo, and because this could reflect badly on developers even if they had nothing to do with the shareware distributor ("why did I have to pay $5 for a demo of your game?", someone might, and probably did, complain) and so some people set restrictions on how much you could actually charge for a given shareware release in their licensing. Not everyone distributing shareware commercially paid attention to this, but enough did.
So then the move to CD-ROM happens, and that actually goes a long way to ameliorating this other issue about upfront costs -- you can fit about 700 floppies' worth of content on a single CD-ROM, and most BBS-distributed software was not anywhere near the capacity of a floppy disk (seriously, at 28K dial-up a 1MB file would probably take 5 minutes to download, assuming steady connection speed and no disconnections, which wasn't really a guarantee). so you could now sell CD-ROMs at a comparable price (since the costs are about the same) and you can sell thousands of games. Perfect impulse-buy fodder at office supply checkout lines. These were shockingly cheap to produce -- just scan a whole bunch of big BBSes for all the files they have, maybe do some quick testing and categorization, and then let 'er rip, err, burn, err, press because you still had to manufacture these discs the standard way.
Because a lot of BBSes let people just upload whatever they wanted and there could be all sorts of stuff out there (for good and ill), these CD-ROM collections are incredible time capsules of a wide range of software from the era, and not always just "greatest hits" notable names of software -- just whatever they could get their hands on, and the more they have the better, because then you can print an even bigger number on the cover as your selling point. Is all of it good? No. Does all of it work? Well, it's more likely now, being able to tune exact CPU cycle rates in tools like DOSBox, that software can run as expected in a way that was unlikely in the Pentium era. So these releases were not quite so editorial -- and IMO, that's part of the fun.
So what this whole preamble has been leading up to is me showing you the Pixelmusement youtube channel, which features a regularly recurring segment called "shovelware diggers". In it, the channel's owner, who tends to go by the handle Gemini, features some of the games and software included on one such massive CD-ROM archive of old BBS content. I want to share what is right now the most recent one, because it has a truly incredible piece of software that is surely interesting to anyone who's actually read up to this point, you absolute weirdos, you. I've added a time code, but it's the middle segment, about the game called "Carts N Axes":
I adore this. Yes, it's pretty simple, but it's very earnest and what you see is what you get. It's a simple game, that's a simple puzzle, and that has only one configuration, but for the time? I would consider it quite charming. It's almost certainly made by a kid with only a handful of tools -- and designed for windows 3.1, not really an operating system conducive to game development. In practice it's similar to a page out of a children's gamebook -- find where all the little treasures are, and if you do then you win, but don't uncover the trolls. Is it basic? It's so basic it's probably coded in basic. But it is deeply earnest in what it is, and very open about being just, a little piece of software put up online that someone can mess around with for a little while, and which wound up getting sold in stores because you can put a ton of small games on a single CD-ROM. I don't believe that preserving all software is either feasible or even possible, but the fact that this just exists is so lovely to behold, as it's a clever little use of the tools available, and not bad at all as a concept for someone who might have never touched any sort of programming back in the day.
To everyone still making these clever and goofy little programs, applets, and web experiences, thank you; it's one of the things I've most enjoyed about this site so far.
By the way, the CD-ROM that is used for this series, the Softkey 2000 Hit Games Collections, is available on the internet archive right now, so nothing is stopping you from playing Carts N Axes right this minute (if your download rate is fast enough): https://archive.org/details/SoftkeyShareware2000games
