Just a small thing I posted on the NCN forum about ST Demos that I thought would fit this blog:
There are two reasons I got so many ST demos: The first is that I got a lot of magazines back then, mostly because of the demos but mostly because it was something my parents knew I would read so they were willing to buy them for me. Sort of the same reason parents buy their kids comics at an early age I suppose.
The second is that ST demos had the same mentality as shareware games do now, in that it's practically a whole game in and of itself and they offer to give you more of it for a small donation. I guess it's because a lot of ST games were made by the same kind of people who make shareware: like one guy and his brother who make it all out of their basement. This is instead of some crappy teaser that doesn't tell you a whole lot like demos are today. The amount of games I've played where the first level was nothing like the rest of the game...
The only thing you can't get your fill of with a demo no matter how big is the game's story - or more accurately, how it ends. But that's fairly inconsequential for most non-RPG games if you ask me, especially back then in the NES/ST era when you were unlikely to get further than a few levels in without dying. In fact that's probably why I buy RPGs and rent/download everything else these days.
Man, long post. I'm really into this stuff though as you can tell.
