Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

Aug 17, 2026

In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium, was a CD-ROM drive. With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed photos[1], VOC soundtracks, and play with Video For Windows butter-smooth 12 fps 240x179 videos[2][3] lasting up to several seconds.

For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). Some added high quality music. My most memorable take on the matter was from id Software's lead developer, John Carmack.

People expect CD games to have tons of digitized speech and video [...] The joke here is that if we ever do a CD version of DOOM, you are going to get the game and “The Making of DOOM” a one hour feature film. John Carmack (Jan '94) for “ATARI EXPLORER ONLINE”

A good idea on paper but bad on CD

By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.

The concept was implemented. The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]. The archive contained QCRACK.EXE , a tool allowing to decrypt every single game on the CD-ROM.

Quake’s shareware retail experiment had proved disastrous. In theory id was going to cut out retailers by allowing gamers to buy the shareware and then call an 800 number to place an order and receive a password that would unlock the rest of the game.

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