Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet

[freely downloadable and redistributable "shareware" preview version coming soon]

Originally published in late 2022 (UK) and early 2023 (US) by Unbound, Shareware Heroes is now officially out of print — as Unbound went bankrupt and the rights (but not the print design files) reverted to me. I hope to one day create a new print edition, but in the meantime I'm putting the digital version back up for sale here.

Includes ePub and PDF versions, both with corrections of errors from the original Unbound release.

Blurb:

Shareware Heroes takes readers on a journey through a critical yet long overlooked chapter in video game history: the rise and eventual fall of the shareware model.

As commercial game distribution professionalised in the 1980s, independent creators with scant resources or contacts were squeezed out of the market. But not entirely. New technologies and distribution concepts were creating a hidden games publishing market – one that operated by different rules and that, at least for the first several years, had no powerful giants.

It was a land of opportunity and promise, and a glimpse of the digital-first future. This is the story of the games and developers who relied on nascent networking technologies combined with word-of-mouth marketing in an era before social media. Building on deep archival research and featuring interviews with creators, developers and other heroes of the shareware age, Richard Moss – author of The Secret History of Mac Gaming – once again brings to light a forgotten but all too important era of game development.

Selected reviews:

Shareware Heroes ... attempts the daunting task of presenting a history of shareware by telling the stories of all the people involved in it. That's the equivalent of trying to follow all the separate threads in a bowl of spaghetti. But Moss, admirably, manages it. - Robert Purchese, Eurogamer

Holy fast and fun read! I just plowed through all the pages like doing a Duke 3D speedrun! Even though I lived a LOT of this, there were so many details I wasn't aware of, or had long forgotten about. This book is like a museum of history you get to walk through. Loved every page of it.

Shareware was the birth of the original indie scene, and look back, I'm shocked at how well we (Apogee, plus id and Epic) all did. We really did start an indie revolution that continues to this day. - Scott Miller, Apogee & 3D Realms founder

It’s the text that draws the reader into the book, though, and this is where Moss definitely delivers. As with his previous book, a passion for the topic comes through loud and clear, and a great balance between factual info-dump (with a small number of forgivable errors) and entertaining narrative is drawn. - Gareth Halfacree, CustomPC Magazine