Have you ever had to put up with this bullshit? Your parents or you in the late 90s/early 2000s goes out to buy a computer game. You see an interesting one, jewel cased and either on a rack or in a bargain bin, and buy it though for some strange reason it is significantly cheaper than the other games with a more expensive version of the same game absent. You install the game as normal and begin to play it with nothing raising any alarm bells, yet. You first notice, in some instances, that the game seems to start on a random level with no context. OK, weird but not a deal breaker but then suddenly the next level seems to be completely out of order! But still you play on and after the second level... a splash screen asking you to buy the full game or a hard quit to desktop.
WHAT THE FUCK?!!! Unleash the rage! Tomb Raider 2, Deus Ex, Commandos, Interstate 76, Quake II, Thief, Need For Speed III, etc. Current and slightly older games with nothing on the jewel case or in the installation splash screen to indicate you just bought a demo of a game that was already freely available online. This shit was the bane of my childhood and for a long time I feared anything less than 15 bucks as it all appeared that anything less than that ran the risk of being a commercially sold demo. It did not occur to me that maybe buying games from the shady corner of a store like Peevee Mart, Zellars, K-Mart, Canadian Tire, and The Bay was not ideal and I was likely paying for something illegally produced by God knows who and sold by ignorant, small city stores trying to diversify their stock. Or was this a real problem that other people experienced, possibly even a forgotten controversy of the videogame industry in the late 90s?
Has anyone here ever experienced this or was I the rare, regular victim of professionally produced, fraudulent products?
Discuss!
P.S. These were not the only shady digital (no)goods I ran into as a kid but that is a thread for another time.
WHAT THE FUCK?!!! Unleash the rage! Tomb Raider 2, Deus Ex, Commandos, Interstate 76, Quake II, Thief, Need For Speed III, etc. Current and slightly older games with nothing on the jewel case or in the installation splash screen to indicate you just bought a demo of a game that was already freely available online. This shit was the bane of my childhood and for a long time I feared anything less than 15 bucks as it all appeared that anything less than that ran the risk of being a commercially sold demo. It did not occur to me that maybe buying games from the shady corner of a store like Peevee Mart, Zellars, K-Mart, Canadian Tire, and The Bay was not ideal and I was likely paying for something illegally produced by God knows who and sold by ignorant, small city stores trying to diversify their stock. Or was this a real problem that other people experienced, possibly even a forgotten controversy of the videogame industry in the late 90s?
Has anyone here ever experienced this or was I the rare, regular victim of professionally produced, fraudulent products?
Discuss!
P.S. These were not the only shady digital (no)goods I ran into as a kid but that is a thread for another time.
