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8 Shareware Games Everyone Should Have Played

This article is over 10 years old and may contain outdated information

Who doesn’t remember Commander Keen or Wolfenstein 3D, two great shareware games that helped many a gamer get into gaming. Today we celebrate those games with a gallery of eight of the most influential shareware games in the history of shareware.

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Wolfenstein 3D may be one of the first first person shooters but it was also one of the early successes of shareware gaming. Free games about shooting Nazis? Sign me up.

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Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons helped usher in a generation of gamers. How could you not be keen on Commander Keen is beyond me.

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The Adventures of Captain Comic is one of the early adopters of shareware. This helped forge the way for many to come. Now go back to playing your overpriced game that won’t fill you with the joy that Captain Comic did.

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Doom wasn’t always just a movie with The Rock, it was once a very influential game. Very influential for its gameplay and for the fact that it was indeed shareware.

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Scorched Earth was more than just the precursor to Worms and their destruction. Scorched Earth also trained a generation of people to misuse tanks.

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Duke Nukem wasn’t always just a pretty face and gun firer. He was once the star of shareware with the original Duke Nukem and it’s popular sequel Duke Nukem 2. Because when you have to kill every motherscratcher in a room accept no substitutes.

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One of the first episodic shareware games, Kingdom of Kroz spawned a series of games suitable for sharing. Now we just wait for the inevitable modern remake.

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Raptor: Call of the Shadows featured you as a futuristic pilot mercenary sent to different planets to destroy competitors of a mega corporation. You may be flying in a modern plane but trust me, it’s the future.


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